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Just How Many Programs Have You Written and Never Released?

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Renegade:
I've written more than I could possibly hope to count. Custom web log analytic software, text utilities, web scraping software, a Flickr uploader... More than I care to list.

It's a thing though. I need to do a task, so I write a program to do it.

Anyone else?

f0dder:
Yup.

Most of the stuff I've programmed has never been released, as it's small tools designed for pretty specific tasks - and lots of code snippets done mostly to play around with APIs/algorithms/whatever for the sake of doing just that.

Eóin:
I tend to stop working on programs before they are fit to be released. It's not that I abandon them, but it's just that often a program will reach the stage where it's good enough for my purposes and I don't feel like I personally would benefit from the additional work needed to make it releasable.

I'm kind of that way now with a new utility. I could easily hardcode my specific use case now and be done with it. Or I could add a UI to make it more generally useful, but at the cost of a tonne of extra work.

I'm not sure if that's the type of thing you're talking about?

Renegade:
I tend to stop working on programs before they are fit to be released. It's not that I abandon them, but it's just that often a program will reach the stage where it's good enough for my purposes and I don't feel like I personally would benefit from the additional work needed to make it releasable.

I'm kind of that way now with a new utility. I could easily hardcode my specific use case now and be done with it. Or I could add a UI to make it more generally useful, but at the cost of a tonne of extra work.

I'm not sure if that's the type of thing you're talking about?
-Eóin (January 10, 2011, 09:16 AM)
--- End quote ---

Nope. That's exactly what I mean. I do hard coding for things too. One of the reasons that things don't get released. Need a change? Edit the code. Compile. Run. Good enough for what I need.

Even for TINY little things, the cost to make it release quality is immense, and often more than the actual software itself.

timns:
Boy, this thread sounds familiar. I guess I'm the same - lots of little thingies that are hopelessly specific, but solved some little requirement at the time.

...and, yes, a lot of false starts on projects that one day I hope to really do properly.

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