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Hell, according to many religious beliefs, is a place or a state of pain and suffering (Ref: Wikipedia.org). And it is not limited to religious text books only. In my limited universe, I can imagin the following Hells that will haunt me besides the usual we can expect in this mortal world.

The Coding Hell

A recent post on drupal.org on The Road to Drupal Hell or rather the classical hack the code to death hell. I do hope most of the software developers must be familiar with this.

I know of a website suffering from the same problem. During development there have been so many mods in the core CMS (Mambo) and the theming system that it has now become unmaintainable, almost impossible to update, always on ventilator against one problem or another. The initial excitement to modify and customise the CMS to an extent that no one know which fix will break what. And how can I say so, I am responsible for maintenance of the above said website and please I am not entirely responsible for this problem.

Then another one for a dutch friend, modifications to the core CMS (phpwebsites) has rendered that website unmaintainable. This was a low budget project and to get quick results the CMS code was hacked and again the end result, upgrading the CMS is a hell.

Ahh.. then there is the Microsoft Windows development libraries/ API's (MFC and Win32 to be specific), I am actively teaching Windows Programming using Win16 and Win32 for last 2 years now.

And so many other projects which I may not mention here.

The greed to get quick results will lead straight into hell or atleast will make the upgrade process hellish.

Research Hell

On an after though I can compare the situation with something more serious described in this article on current status of R&D activities. Maybe we are leading towards an RnD for quick profit hell or maybe we are already there. The patent hell, the propriatery implementation hell, the aim for sales aka, aim for pure profits aka aim for stock value hell.

Maybe it is Quick results versus Research. And Quick results are winning.