Abstract
Reading Alex E. Bell’s2 and Mark Guzdial’s3 “Viewpoint” columns in the August 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM, I was struck by the synergy of the two articles. One is a cautionary tale about the tools to use in professional software development, and the other is, at least in part, a cautionary tale about language and syntax use in teaching programming. This got me to thinking about all the silver bullets we’ve tried in both development and education, and why most of them don’t matter to real software development. This seems like an appropriate way to wrap up this discussion on software development.
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. —Frederick Brooks, Jr.
It’s the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There’s an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation. —Andy Hertzfeld
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© 2011 John Dooley
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Dooley, J. (2011). Wrapping It all Up. In: Software Development and Professional Practice. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-3802-7_16
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