

Software's Dirty Little Secret - edu
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=softwares-dirty-little-secret

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swombat
_There needs to be a consistent way of writing software that runs on different
systems and in different situations that considers a number of different
factors_

Umm, right, sure. And how do you propose to do that when the field evolves so
fast that most technical books go out of date within 2 years?

There doesn't _need_ to be any such consistent way. What there needs to be is
already there, for the simple reason that what is there is driven by exactly
that: needs. Where absolute reliability is required (e.g. NASA), programs are
written with that kind of discipline. For the rest of us who are ok with
living in a giant, glorious mess of creativity, why should anyone dictate how
we do things?

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silentbicycle
Summary: Software tends to grow haphazardly, and often instead of being
internally organized in any fashion, more code is just piled on. As code bases
grow, they become very hard to manage, and "smaller and nimbler" competition
can step in.

If this is a secret, it's a pretty open one. _taps copy of Thinking Forth, c.
1984._

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gaius
Methodologist hawks methodology; film at 11.

