The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

The solution, I think, is to merge the files, to incorporate the documentation in the source program.

Exploiting the mass market to avoid constructing what can be bought.

All successful software gets changed. Two processes are at work. As a software product is found to be useful, people try it in new cases at the edge of, or beyond, the original domain. The pressures for extended function come chiefly from users who like the basic function and invent new uses for it.

The most powerful contribution of expert systems will surely be to put at the service of the inexperienced programmer the experience and accumulated wisdom of the best programmers. This is no small contribution.

those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.

My first proposal is that each software organization must determine and proclaim that great designers are as important to its success as great managers are, and that they can be expected to be similarly nurtured and rewarded.

Therefore, whether we do this by object class libraries or procedure libraries, we must face the fact that we are radically raising the sizes of our programming vocabularies. Vocabulary learning constitutes no small part of the intellectual barrier to reuse.