June 17, 2008

The set of good programmers is still very small, a great joke by David Parnas

A reviewer explained his rejection of my best-known paper on the subject by writing, "Obviously Parnas does not know what he is talking about because nobody does it that way". Only a decade later, however, a textbook stated, "Parnas only wrote down what all good programmers did anyway". A logician would conclude that the set of good programmers was empty; that set is still very small.

-- David L. Parnas

No comments: