These features make end-user development possible, but we believe they are not enough to make it probable.
ACE: Building Interactive Graphical Applications by Jeff Johnson, Bonnie Nardi, Craig Zarmer and James Miller in Communications of the ACM, April, 1993
Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don’t fit into a language. There shouldn’t be one.
Design Principles Behind Smalltalk by Dan Ingalls in Byte, 1981 August
Studying how the various parameters of BitTorrent can be adjusted to improve the overall efficiency, and proposing improvements to the protocol only makes sense if deficiencies of the protocol or significant room for improvements are identified. We decided in this study to make the step before, i.e., to explore how BitTorrent is behaving on real torrents. We found in particular that the last piece problem, which is one of the most studied problem with proposed improvements of BitTorrent is in fact a marginal problem that cannot be observed in our torrent test.
Understanding BitTorrent: An Experimental Perspective by Arnaud Legout, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller and Pietro Michiardi, INRIA Technical Report, 2005 September
For accounting, you only need to be able to add. For finance, you need to be able to understand probability.
What I Know About How You Invest by Terry Odean at Legg Mason Funds Management Investment Conference, 2003 November 7
Select a project as advanced as you can conceive, as ambitious as you can justify, in the hope that routine work can be kept to a minimum; hold out against all pressure to incorporate such system expansions that would only result in a purely quantitative increase of the total amount of work to be done.
The Structure of the “THE”-Multiprogramming System by Edsger Dijkstra in Communications of the ACM, 1968 May
The error of Wilson in Mexico, of Nixon in Vietnam, of our whole quest for “self-determination,” is clear: we have reversed the order of cause and effect. Free elections are created by free men, not vice versa. The machinery of election will not call up, establish, or guarantee political freedom. The belief that it will reveals our trust in “the market,” our belief that competition of itself makes excellence prevail. Our faith in the electoral process is based entirely on myths of the market. We think we can be “open” to all political alternatives (we cannot). We think we welcome all competitors for power (we do not). We think the freedoms we possess were wrought by this process (they were not). We think the process will work automatically for others (it will not). If our freedoms are impaired, we think — as Dr. Wald did — this comes from some failure in the voting process (it does not). And we hope to cure all such discontent by repairing, restoring, or improving the process (we cannot). We think that voting is freedom’s “invisible hand.” Read More »
The issue is design, not programming language.
Why Software Jewels are Rare by David Parnas in IEEE Computer, 1996 February
She nodded. “And what did you learn?”
It was a good question. On day three the cutter had arranged a group rendezvous, where we’d met in the dark nearly a mile from camp and snorted meth that she’d smuggled in the hem of her rain pants. I felt again for a moment the awful burn it produced in the back of my throat, then the exhilarating lift as my skeleton took flight. Of all the discoveries I was supposed to have made, the only one that felt real was that when you lose your identical twin, in a way you become two people.
“I learned how to tie a bowline,” I said.
Mascots by Ted Thompson in Tin House, 2009 Spring
We have no less than 65 implementations of TRUE and FALSE in the tree
[patch 1/1] consolidate TRUE and FALSE from Andrew Morton in the Linux kernel mailing list
The criers and the kibitzers. The criers, earnest, complaining with a peculiar vigor about their businesses, their gas mileage, their health; their despair articulate, dependably lamenting their lives, vaguely mourning conditions, their sorrow something they could expect no one to understand. The kibitzers, deaf to grief, winking confidentially at the others, their voices high-pitched in kidding or lowered in conspiracy to tell of triumphs, of men they knew downtown, of tickets fixed or languishing goods moved suddenly and unexpectedly, of the windfall that was life; their fingers sticky, smeared with the sugar from their rolls.
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers by Stanley Elkin in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, 1980
She stuck out her chest and saluted. “Uniform. Badge. Big gun. A gun is a substitute penis. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t go to college,” Dave said.
The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of by Joseph Hanson, 1978
It is dangerous to place too much hope in any improvement coming from just following new fashions, if we lack insight into what really went wrong before.
More Taste: Less Greed? by C. H. Forsyth
These social spaces run into the same content crunch that games do. And then worse, they run into the problem that a lot of people come in and say, “Well, what do I do? I understand that if you hand me a sword and there’s a spider over there, I can go and hack it. But I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do if I’m just here with other people.”
Changing Realities by Cory Ondrejka at the 22nd Chaos Communications Congress, Berlin, 2005
Two women in sweaters stroll down Kramgasse, arm in arm, laughing with such abandon that they could be thinking no thought of the future.
Einstein’s Dream by Alan Lightman, 1993
I don’t care for dogs. They combine creep and crap to a degree found only otherwise in PR men.
Threatened Species by Reginald Hill in Pascoe’s Ghost, 1979
Mathematical methods will be the key to improved professionalism in software engineering, but they must be rescued from the grip of philosophers who preach sermons about formality.
Mathematical Methods: What We Need and Don’t Need by David Parnas in IEEE Computer, 1996 April
