Software development is neither a scientific nor an engineering task. It is an act of reality construction that is political and artistic.

Although the claim is made that C++ is a general-purpose programming language, that assertion should be modified. C++ is a general-purpose language for describing and efficiently implementing programs that model software implementation constructs (for example, control structures, data structures, and algorithms), virtual machines, or hardware elements.

Mathematicians use an “Erdos Number” as an indicator of their association with Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific and brilliant mathematicians of the past century. Erdos himself had the number 0, those who coauthored a paper with him had the number 1, coauthoring with a coauthor yielded 2, and so on. Extreme programmers are given a “Ward Number” based on pair programming with him (1), pair programming with someone who paired with him (2), and so forth.

Цікаво чи є відео, де він програмує.

Humans and human abilities are still the key to software development success. This, in turn, suggests that we need to reconsider how we go about enhancing human abilities instead of attempting to replace them with machine capabilities.

Refactoring is a way for “lazy” objects to give all the hard work to other objects.

Lines of code, for example, in a well-thought-out object application will be at least an order of magnitude fewer (sometimes two orders of magnitude). This means that a 1 million–line program, written conventionally by developers thinking like a computer, can be duplicated with object thinking in 100,000 lines of code or fewer. Time to delivery is reduced by at least 50 percent and often by as much as 70 percent. Projects scheduled to take 2 years to complete can be done in 8 to 12 months.

Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir advanced a theory (overstated here) to the effect that what you could and did think was determined by the language you spoke and that some languages allowed you to think “better” than others. Whorf was particularly interested in the Hopi language.

Схожу інформацію я зустрічав і раніше, коли порівнювали середню довжину слів у військових командах китайців та росіян: у китайців вона складала 7 літер, а у росіян - лише 5. Правда у критичних ситуаціях росіяни могли зменшувати середню кількість літер у командах до трьох. Я вважав, що це байка.

Fact 1: The most important factor in software work is not the tools and techniques used by the programmers but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.
Fact 2: The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers, according to “individual differences” research. Given that their pay is never commensurate, they are the biggest bargains in the software field.
—Robert L. Glass[3]

Bloated, inefficient, bug-ridden, user-unfriendly, and marginally useful—these are still common adjectives used to describe software.

Слова написані у 2004 актуальні і у 2016. А ви все про методології розробки говорите.