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

The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline,

In the Beginning … Was the Command

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.

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.

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

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

it, the book taught me the dictionary. The rest of it, the bulk of what I learned about software engineering—how to split a big problem into smaller ones, how to connect the pieces together, how to figure out why it didn’t work, and how to decide when it was finished—I figured out on my own by trial and error, and everybody else in the class figure

“Separate the code that uses an object from the code that creates an object.”

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.”