See the previous post in this series for togetherness.
The reality is that people do write stories with perfect characters. While the situations in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books were broken and brought about by despicable (not many shades of gray) men and beautiful but damaged women, John Clayton (or John Carter) was pretty much perfect.
When writing software, you almost never have a perfect feature. There are so many different possibilities that somewhere, in some place, at some time, your feature would be rendered imperfect.
Gemmell might not stand against literary giants, but I’ll read him once a year at least.
Gmail doesn’t do exactly what Outlook does, but I’m not going back.
So what do we do?
We write stories and software to be more than the sum of their parts.