Several People Have Told Me That My

Programming Is One Of The Most Difficult Branches Of Applied Mathematics; The Poorer Mathematicians Had Better Remain Pure Mathematicians.

Write A Paper Promising Salvation, Make It A "structured" Something Or A "virtual" Something, Or "abstract," "distributed" Or "higher-order" Or "applicative" And You Can Almost Be Certain Of Having Started A New Cult.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

I Now Have Had My Foggy Crystal Ball For Quite A Long Time. Its Predictions Are Invariably Gloomy And Usually Correct, But I Am Quite Used To That And They Won't Keep Me From Giving You A Few Suggestions, Even If It Is Merely An Exercise In Futility Whose Only Effect Is To Make You Feel Guilty.

… What Society Overwhelmingly Asks For Is Snake Oil. Of Course, The Snake Oil Has The Most Impressive Names — Otherwise You Would Be Selling Nothing — Like “structured Analysis And Design”, “software Engineering”, “maturity Models”, “management Information Systems”, “integrated Project Support Environments” “object Orientation” And “business Process Re-engineering”.