Aim For Brevity While Avoiding Jargon.

In This Respect A Program Is Like A Poem: You Cannot Write A Poem Without Writing It. Yet People Talk About Programming As If It Were A Production Process And Measure "programmer Productivity" In Terms Of "number Of Lines Of Code Produced". In So Doing They Book That Number On The Wrong Side Of The Ledger: We Should Always Refer To "the Number Of Lines Of Code Spent".

In The Wake Of The Cultural Revolution And Now Of The Recession I Observe A Mounting Pressure To Co-operate And To Promote "teamwork." For Its Anti-individualistic Streak, Such A Drive Is Of Course Highly Suspect; Some People May Not Be So Sensitive To It, But Having Seen The Hitlerjugend In Action Suffices For The Rest Of Your Life To Be Very Wary Of "team Spirit." Very.

We Are All Shaped By The Tools We Use, In Particular: The Formalisms We Use Shape Our Thinking Habits, For Better Or For Worse, And That Means That We Have To Be Very Careful In The Choice Of What We Learn And Teach, For Unlearning Is Not Really Possible.

The Use Of Anthropomorphic Terminology Forces You Linguistically To Adopt An Operational View. And It Makes It Practically Impossible To Argue About Programs Independently Of Their Being Executed.

The Required Techniques Of Effective Reasoning Are Pretty Formal, But As Long As Programming Is Done By People That Don't Master Them, The Software Crisis Will Remain With Us And Will Be Considered An Incurable Disease. And You Know What Incurable Diseases Do: They Invite The Quacks And Charlatans In, Who In This Case Take The Form Of Software Engineering Gurus.