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<p>ISIS was bad, but it wasn’t pull your hair out <em>horrible</em>. I thought ISIS could have been designed better, but at least it was <em>fast</em>. </p>
<p>Perhaps you’re talking from the perspective of being faculty, and maybe ISIS wasn’t as “integrated” as its name set it out to be?</p>
<p>The idea that “this project’s importance/impact is big, therefore I must code an extremely big big system” is not a very good programming paradigm.</p>
<p>To see an example of an efficient and reliable operating system in which few people were paid to make (most people were volunteers collaborators), see Linux. Its code also happens to be open-source and transparent. To see an example of an obese and unrealiable operating system made by developers with a huge payroll, see Microsoft Windows. Now, I have to use Windows myself because that is the culture of the consumer-end here, but if you ask any savvy server administrator what OS they use – they almost certainly do not use Windows. Inexperienced server administrators use Windows servers … and then get struck with security breaches. I believe CC uses a classic Apache-on-RedHat (I think?).</p>
<p>I am ranting here because there is no other real forum for complaining. I mean, really – there isn’t a “Questions? Comments?” link in SIS. That’s because the University appears to have no control over the development of its own system – it gets controlled by a bunch of guys in a random office in Oracle. Guess what would happen if it were student-run? A bunch of students would prolly be fixing various issues with SIS right now, and coming up with various project proposals. (I mean if I were skilled enough with web programming, I’d be – if I knew what the source code was I’d be.)</p>
<p>One of the lessons of college is how to break down a big project into tiny little bits. That’s how stuff gets done. It also allows stuff to be contributed by people who otherwise wouldn’t be in the project. SIS unfortunately, appears to have no sense of modularity, so modularity would be one of the first issues to fix. A good example of this model working is Wikipedia. That’s why it’s been so successful. Of course, a SIS-like project would have to be more protected and we would know the identity of all the contributors.</p>