Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail?

[[deleted user]]

Oh, the painful reminder of the days of massive paper manuals with frequent updates! This chapter is a reminder of life pre-graphics displays, pre-hypertext, pre-browsers, pre-PDF, pre-Kindle, pre-iPad! And, the marvel of microfiche!

It is interesting to witness the struggle with communication scale at the time, and the emphasis on efficient documentation as the solution. While there is a dismissive hint at the power of programming to interfaces instead of implementations, this chapter does not anticipate the progress of interfaces, objects, and frameworks (let alone test-driven development or agile methods). I think that the decreasing dependence on documentation is one of the major technology trends in the decades of software engineering... for both design and users.

On the management side, I agree with the "producer as boss" model for most large projects.

[Erik]

I've never worked on anything anywhere near as big as the projects described in this book, so my frame of reference is different. A 5 foot thick manual that changes a few inches each day also seems hard to imagine.

I have experienced the "clans" and communication issues. My observations are that clans seem to happen with any group over about 8 people.