http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf
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“chanageability”
- In part, this is so because the software of a system embodies its function, and the function is the part that most feels the pressures of change. In part it is because software can be changed more easily—it is pure thought-stuff, infinitely malleable. Buildings do in fact get changed, but the high costs of change, understood by all, serve to dampen the whims of the changers.
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“invisibility”[]
- software is hard to visualize. feel this sop hard never know how to diagram or show what a system is doing
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promise of “graphical programming”
- Second, the screens of today are too small, in pixels, to show both the scope and the resolution of any serious detailed software diagram. The so-called “desktop metaphor” of today’s workstation is instead an “airplane-seat” metaphor. Anyone who has shuffled a lapful of papers while seated in a coach between two portly passengers will recognize the difference—one can see only a very few things at once.
- The true desktop provides overview of and random access to a score of pages. Moreover, when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for
- the more spacious floor.
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Buy versus build
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The cost of software has always been development cost, not
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replication cost. Sharing that cost among even a few users radically cuts the per-user cost. Another way of looking at it is that the use of n copies of a software system effectively multiplies the productivity of its developers by n. That is an enhancement of the productivity of the discipline and of the nation.
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Argument for fa: tools for thought: I believe the single most powerful software productivity strategy for man
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organizations to day is to equip the computer-naïve intellectual workers on the firing line
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with personal computers and good generalized writing, drawing, file and spreadsheet
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programs, and turn them loose. The same strategy, with simple programming
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capabilities, will also work for hundreds of laboratory scientists.
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Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, cleaner, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.
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