Systems software technology and business
My knowledge of Talmud is, to be generous, zilch, but consider the format and style of Talmud. This is what you get when each commentator takes the arguments of colleagues and predecessors seriously. In the center a discussion between one group of experts, commented on and amplified by a second group. On the side a [...]
Spolsky recently writes
Alain de Botton, writing in The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon Books, 2006) has a section on elegance that any software designer will find familiar.
And I do find it drearily familiar: it is ignorantly dismissive and embraces the Le Corbusier fallacy and, (oddly) directly contradicts Spolsky’s argument. Le Corbusier was an architect [...]
Here are four quotes. Quotes 1, 3, and 4 all make sense together, if you are sufficiently cynical, but quote #2 is remarkably odd when taken with the others.
1For ten years now, free software developers have tried various methods of finding funds, with some success. There’s no need to make anyone rich; the median [...]
wish I was like Mr. Gates, all my money in big crates – Bruce Springstein
One of the many peculiar features of the software industry is the stubborn manner in which important innovations are ignored. If you read this account of Microsoft’s source code managment methods and this more believable response, and you know about BitKeeper, [...]