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.

In the Beginning … Was the Command

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

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

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.”

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

The Science of Computing: Shaping a Discipline,

The software industry has evolved in just a couple of generations, leaving little time to reflect on how things are done.

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