Sublime

One of the greatest programmers in history, who did indeed understand every component of the computer from the software down to the chip, Niklaus Wirth, wrote “the belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail

peer recognition

It was mathematically proven over fifty years ago that it is often impossible to compute a correct and optimal scheduling solution in finite time for schedules of any significant size.§

This number—which Gittins called the “dynamic allocation index,” and which the world now knows as the Gittins index—

meritocracy.

George Danzig was a graduate student in math at Berkeley. One day, as usual, he rushed in late to his math class and quickly copied the two homework problems from the blackboard. When he later went to do them, he found them very difficult, and it took him several days of hard work to crack them open and solve them. They turned out not to be homewor

The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important.