Brainpower Is By Far Our Scarcest Resource.

Our Intellectual Powers Are Rather Geared To Master Static Relations And That Our Powers To Visualize Processes Evolving In Time Are Relatively Poorly Developed. For That Reason We Should Do (as Wise Programmers Aware Of Our Limitations) Our Utmost To Shorten The Conceptual Gap Between The Static Program And The Dynamic Process, To Make The Correspondence Between The Program (spread Out In Text Space) And The Process (spread Out In Time) As Trivial As Possible.

When We Take The Position That It Is Not Only The Programmer's Responsibility To Produce A Correct Program But Also To Demonstrate Its Correctness In A Convincing Manner, Then The Above Remarks Have A Profound Influence On The Programmer's Activity: The Object He Has To Produce Must Be Usefully Structured.

… What Society Overwhelmingly Asks For Is Snake Oil. Of Course, The Snake Oil Has The Most Impressive Names — Otherwise You Would Be Selling Nothing — Like “structured Analysis And Design”, “software Engineering”, “maturity Models”, “management Information Systems”, “integrated Project Support Environments” “object Orientation” And “business Process Re-engineering”.

How Do We Convince People That In Programming Simplicity And Clarity - In Short: What Mathematicians Call Elegance - Are Not A Dispensable Luxury, But A Crucial Matter That Decides Between Success And Failure?

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.