And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.
It's called doing software properly. From the top to the bottom. It's called relentless simplicity. It's called sound design. It's called proper UI design. It's called Quality beats Schedule.
Actually, that is precisely what Fred Brooks argued. By saying there is no silver bullet, he meant that there was no simple answer to improving software quality. And if you think your solution of "doing software properly" is a simple answer, we have radically different definitions of the word "simple".
From his paper:
"...though no technological breakthrough promises to give the sort of magical results with which we are so familiar in the hardware area, there is both an abundance of good work going on now, and the promise of steady, if unspectacular progress."
He then lists off several areas which he believed (back in 1986) would help to give us that increase in software productivity -- among which was good design. The difference is that he recognized it was going to be the combined effects of improving multiple areas (design, code reuse, etc.) that could give us an order of magnitude improvement.
That is in fact why his essay became "sacred", because in spite of making seemingly outrageous claims at the time, he's been vindicated over and over again.
Course this was posted early this morning and I'm only just catching up on my/. reading so this comment will likely go unnoticed...
Online surveys should NEVER be taken seriously. At BEST they can only be taken as an interesting side note.
Drawing conclusions from an entirely self-selecting group is one of the worst statistical methods possible.
I bet that it is somehow Bush's fault that these "water cars" aren't being mass produced yet. He and his oil cronies are keeping the technology down.
They have also discovered how to create perpetual motion, but are keeping that under wraps too.
There is no proof of god and there is no universal truth, any belief system that relies on such a fiction crumbles in the light of critical thinking and knowledge. Truth is by definition (I believe) universal. This includes all scientific truth as well as truth discovered through faith. The question is what is true, and what is false.
For example, does 1 + 1 = 2? A three volume book on the subject, called Principia Mathematica, attempts to prove the very fundamentals of our system of mathematics from the ground up. Lest you think that "ground level" is 1 + 1 = 2, that proof is hundreds of pages into the first volume. Shortly after being published, mathematicians were attacking the book for inconsistencies and incompleteness.
Of course after all that effort, Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem more or less renders the entire endeavor useless because it states that any system of mathematics (the "universal" language of truth) is either incomplete (meaning there are situations in which it simply falls apart) or inconsistent (meaning there are contradictions somewhere).
All this to say, we accept everything in our lives on faith, including the esteemed scientific "facts" of our time, since none of it can truly be proven without being based on unproven assumptions. Somehow it is alright to go on living, even though there is apparently no complete proof that 1 + 1 = 2. That is precisely how people with faith in God operate as well.
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And, no matter what Fred Brook's sacred book says, there really is a magic bullet for software development.
It's called doing software properly. From the top to the bottom. It's called relentless simplicity. It's called sound design. It's called proper UI design. It's called Quality beats Schedule.
Actually, that is precisely what Fred Brooks argued. By saying there is no silver bullet, he meant that there was no simple answer to improving software quality. And if you think your solution of "doing software properly" is a simple answer, we have radically different definitions of the word "simple".
From his paper:
"...though no technological breakthrough promises to give the sort of magical results with which we are so familiar in the hardware area, there is both an abundance of good work going on now, and the promise of steady, if unspectacular progress."
He then lists off several areas which he believed (back in 1986) would help to give us that increase in software productivity -- among which was good design. The difference is that he recognized it was going to be the combined effects of improving multiple areas (design, code reuse, etc.) that could give us an order of magnitude improvement.
That is in fact why his essay became "sacred", because in spite of making seemingly outrageous claims at the time, he's been vindicated over and over again.
Course this was posted early this morning and I'm only just catching up on my /. reading so this comment will likely go unnoticed...
Online surveys should NEVER be taken seriously. At BEST they can only be taken as an interesting side note. Drawing conclusions from an entirely self-selecting group is one of the worst statistical methods possible.
I bet that it is somehow Bush's fault that these "water cars" aren't being mass produced yet. He and his oil cronies are keeping the technology down. They have also discovered how to create perpetual motion, but are keeping that under wraps too.