There’s an old story about NASA trying to develop a pen that astronauts could use in space. It was tricky to get ink to flow upside down, and pens kept failing. We spent millions of dollars trying to come up with a space pen, until someone realized how the Russians solved the problem—they used pencils. Unfortunately this story is an urban legend, but it still gets told a lot in the software world. Like all good fables, this one illustrates a common mistake—the one where people set out to solve the wrong problem. The problem NASA needed to solve was not “How can we make a pen that writes upside
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