Software Engineering Methologies, Paradigms, and Practices

IT Industry

“The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.” —attributed to Edsger Dijkstra 1930-2002.

Computer Languages

Exposition


• The Unix-Hater's handbook, by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann, and Don Hopkins. 1994. The entire book is available at http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf and local mirror: ugh.pdf.zip

The Rise of “Worse is Better”↗ by Richard P Gabriel, 1991 (local copy)

• “Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant”, By Simson Garfinkel, 2001-01-08. http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/garf/2001/01/08/bad_java/print.html, (local copy)

• Joseph M. Newcomer. Optimization: Your Worst Enemy, 1999. http://flounder.com/optimization.htm (local copy)

• Theodore W Gray, author of Mathematica frontend, on educational math software, video games, and violence, 200205. http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/index.html; (local copy)

• the famous “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” by computer scientist Edsger W Dijkstra, 1968. http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/; (local copy)

• Steve Job's interview by Wired (1996-02), on education system and design. Steve Job is a insightful man. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html. (Local copy)

• Suck.com's Greg Knauss on Netscape and the “Skin” phenomenon. http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/04/10/daily.html; (Local copy)

• Communications of the ACM 34, 4 (April 1991), 18. Henry G Baker, 1990. (On the harm of speed) http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/letters/CACM-DubiousAchievement.html; (local copy)

• Jamie Zawinski, notorious programer of xemacs and Netscape web browser, has written a webpage that contains codes from Netscape browser before its OpenSource release. Note the profanity laiden comments and what they say. It gives a indication of the pain and fucked-up-ness of computing industry. http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html (20040802 local copy)

Let's Make Unix Not Suck↗, by Miguel De Icaza, 1999.

• Code Complete : A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve C McConnell (amazon.com↗). Throw away all your Design Patterns or eXtreme Programming books. If you want a scientific book on software development analysis, read this book instead.

• Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity. 1999. (amazon.com↗) This book explains away the errors of today's softwares. Alan Cooper also wrote the book About Face, on software interface design.


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Page created: 2002.
© 2002 by Xah Lee.
Xah Signet