"Dreaming In Code"

[fiefoe]

Scott Rosenberg quotes so much from Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" that this could serve as CliffsNotes of that classic.

Other quotes:

• "I'm convinced that a single programmer has a certain amount of code that they can handle in their heads, or in a file, that they can comfortably manage," van Rossum says.
• applying to software the architecture theorist Vitruvius's principles of good design: firmness - sound structure no bugs; commodity - "A program should be suitable for the purposes for which it was intended"; delight - "The experience of using the program should be a pleasurable one."
  
• "It's like, when you grab the software in your hands, it's sand. And as you stand here doing the best you can, sand starts leaking between your fingers... Your job is to keep your hands as tight as possible."
• "When you de-emphasize protocols and pay attention to patterns on surfaces, you enter into a world of approximation rather than perfection," Lanier: "With protocols you tend to be drawn into all-or-nothing high-wire acts of perfect adherence in at least some aspects of your design."
  
• Richard Gabriel: "They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines?.. So you don't study the literature of the thing you're trying to build."
  
• Kurzweil argues that "in the short term we always underestimate how hard things are, but in the long term we underestimate how big changes are."
  
• In one observer's characterization of the two languages' partisans, Perlites are "chaotic/good trickster archetypes" where "Pythonistas are peaceful, have-their-glasses-on-a-little-string types, like hobbits or the Dutch."