Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Mythical Man Month - Computerphile" video.

  1. Social science is considered a “soft” science. That’s a physicist/mathematician’s way of saying “not a real science”. Remember, this is not just any old “project management” -- this is about the management of software-development projects. If you don’t understand what’s so special about that, you need to read Brooks’ book.
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  2. One of the interesting points about the book is where it discusses improvements in programmer productivity over time. There was an order of magnitude improvement over the decade 1985-1995 (up to the point he did the Anniversary Edition), and he discussed how another order of magnitude might be managed over the subsequent decade. He saw that it was essential to move to ever higher-level languages, which left more of the details to lower layers -- he called this “metaprogramming”. His example of a “metaprogramming” language was AppleScript -- a choice which has not stood the test of time, and one area where the book shows its age. What was more effective at the time was Perl, possibly also Tcl, which have since been joined by others including Ruby, JavaScript/Node, PHP and Python. These are the languages that, in my view, have really made a difference to programming since then.
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  3. I was looking at some statistics a few years ago on contributions to the Linux kernel. At the time there were something like 1000 active contributors, and 10,000 lines of new/changed code flowing into the kernel each day. Which worked out to 10 lines per contributor per day -- which is a figure straight out of Brooks.
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  4. The collision between “Plan To Throw One Away” and “Second-System Effect” was particularly amusing ...
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  5. Social science is considered a “soft” science. That’s a physicist/mathematician’s way of saying “not a real science”. Remember, this is not just any o ld “project management” -- this is about the management of software-development projects. If you don’t understand what’s so special about that, you need to read Brooks’ book.
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  6. If you’ve read anything by Douglas Hofstadter -- particularly his classic Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid -- that law of his starts to make more sense.
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  7. 6:26 Not just an odd number, but a prime number: 7. One that cannot be evenly divided up into anything else! Before byte addressability became de rigueur , computers had word lengths like 24 bits, 36 bits, 60 bits -- all numbers with lots of integer divisors including powers of 2 and 3, even 5, so they could be divided up into equal-sized portions in many different ways. But with byte addressability, the basic unit is 8 bits, and the natural machine word length (so far) is 2, 4 or 8 times this. So the only factors you have are powers of 2, which limits the ways you can divide them up.
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  8. You must hate Unicode.
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  9. I see my comment got “held for review” because it had the world “o
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  10. ld” in it. I can never tell whether a comment is “held for review” or just deleted, so I will leave both versions up.
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  11.  @autohmae  What ideas did JavaScript take from AppleScript, pray tell?
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  12.  @autohmae  I used AppleScript for about a decade from its introduction in 1993. The only “event system” it had during that time was AppleEvents, and JavaScript has never had (or needed) anything like that. AppleScript was slow and made simple things awkward. For example, taking a substring of a string would raise an error if the substring was empty. Any other language would return a zero-length substring, but no, AppleScript required you to check for that situation as a special case.
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  13.  @autohmae  I used HyperCard for many years, mostly as a GUI framework. I wrote collections of XCMDs and XFCNs for accessing low-level functionality in the Mac OS, like QuickDraw graphics (e.g. drawing colour graphics when HyperCard itself didn’t support colour), sound calls, speech synthesis and quite a few other things. It certainly popularized a variety of ideas, but I don’t think most of them were original. For example, are you thinking of the “on-xxx” handlers in HyperTalk? So that you could attach little sequences of code to buttons, text fields and even an entire card, to respond to user clicks and other events. I would say that idea goes back to Smalltalk in the 1970s. Not only did Xerox PARC pioneer the concept of the GUI, they also invented event-driven programming to go with it.
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  14. 8:18 Of course, the logical next step would have been bit -addressability. A bit impractical with only 32 address bits, but now we have 64 bits, why has no one considered this worth doing? All transfers between CPU and RAM nowadays are actually in units of cache blocks, with smaller transfers happening only between registers and L1 cache, so the speed impact should be minimal. And it would simplify various kinds of bit-manipulation algorithms.
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