The Problem With Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code (The MIT Press)

In the Beginning … Was the Command

programmers have arrived at a situation where they can be paid large sums of money to pursue an activity that many of them would do in their spare time anyway, in an environment that entails no undue physical exertion or risk.

The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.”

Unfortunately, as Parnas put it, “[Programmers] have been fed so many ‘silver bullets’ that they don’t believe anything anymore.”12

The Gang of Four stated two principles of good object-oriented design that were present in all the patterns: “favor object composition over class inheritance” and “program to an interface, not an implementation.”8

Nobody is going to assume that the same bridge design, with just a few modifications, will handle twice as much distance or weight,

Despite graduating with a degree in computer science, I was sorely lacking in the wisdom that I would eventually acquire, through experience, during my career as a programmer. And it’s not just me: essentially all programmers working today were self-taught. The people who designed the Internet were self-taught, those who architected Windows were se

This institutionalized acceptance of shoddiness is one of the most shameful aspects of software engineering. Software bugs are not inevitable, but trying to write software that never crashes is a nongoal, as they say, for the current crop of programmers.

The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline,

Niklaus Wirth, “A Brief History of Software Engineering,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30, no. 3 (July–September 2008): 34.