• System architects once were the people who said “no” to features to maintain design consistency and coherency. Now architects are the people who buy and bring in external frameworks and technologies (killing any chance of consistency or coherency). Kind of like the Fahrenheit 451 quote “I remember firemen used to fight fires.”
• By far the thing that aged the worst was the reverence for the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointing) paradigm. At this point I think we can argue that WIMP codified a lot of provably bad decisions: desktops, icons, menus and mouse out of visual field. Maybe some of the ideas prior to WIMP (like SAGE’s light-pens) or after WIMP (application launcher noun-verb theories like Quicksilver, search, touch pads, full screen apps, versioning and not forcing the user to adapt to the file storage abstraction) are actually much more fundamental. I think we all were seduced by the 1968 Engelbart demo but forget that the Semi Automated Ground Environment was a production deployed direct (light pen) multi user information sharing point and click system since 1959.
  
  

  SAGE station, Computer History Museum- Mountain View, CA

• Most everything else ages very well. The discussions of pain of having to work “out of core” remain relevant as this is what we now call “big data” (though in Brooks’ time this pain extends to documentation, source code and binaries all of which are too big to hold in memory or even in machine accessible format in the time of the IBM System/360).

  Though in the old days- “out of core” meant punched cards, punched tape, magnetic tape or very slow hard disks (which were a new luxury for the period Brooks writes about).
  

  
  

  SDS 920 with built in tape-drive, Computer History Museum- Mountain View, CA

• Linkers were among the biggest problems in the 1960s and remain the so now (though we now call it late binding, jars, shared libraries and APIs). At one point Brooks throws up his hands and says that it would be faster to just re-compile everything than to deal with some relocating linkers.
• Brooks definitely advocates and anticipates things like developer wikis (though he had to use microfiche as the computers of his day didn’t have enough storage to manage their own documentation).
• “Literate Programming” is clearly anticipated.
• Version control procedures are definitely written about, but Brooks seems not to anticipate version control software.

Overall: very well written and still interesting and relevant.

Related posts:

1. Map Reduce: A Good Idea
2. Good Graphs: Graphical Perception and Data Visualization
3. Must Have Software

The spirit of the list is to pick items such that: if you disagree with an item in this list then either you are wrong or you know something I would really like to hear about.

Encryption, disk images: TrueCrypt (open source: Linux, Windows, OSX)

TrueCrypt can create portable encrypted virtual disks (files that can be mounted as a disk on any operating system).

Encryption, files: GnuPG (open source: Linux, Windows, OSX)

GnuPG is the tool to use to encrypt files for email.

Presentation: Apple Keynote (commercial: OSX)

Keynote is not quite as friendly as Microsoft PowerPoint, but it quickly produces beautiful presentations.

Reference Library: Papers (commercial: OSX)

“iTunes for PDF.” Manage thousands of PDFs and references, annotate with meta-data, place papers into multiple project folders. An interesting runner-up is BibDesk (open source: OSX).

Spreadsheet: Microsoft Excel (commercial: Windows, OSX)

Open Office and Google Docs are getting better every day, but neither come close to Microsoft Excel in functionality and versatility of user interface. If you are on a platform that supports Excel, working regularly with spreadsheets and using something other than Excel: it really means that you do not value your time.

Statistics Software: R (open source: Linux, Windows, OSX)

R is rapidly becoming the platform of choice for statisticians and is (with the addition of lattice and ggplot2) the best way to produce graphs. R has fairly nasty programming language, but has so many statistical operations available that it can not be avoided.

Technical Documentation: LaTeX (open source: Linux, Windows, OSX)

It may seem antiquated but TeX/LaTex is still far more powerful than the “WSYWYG” pretenders. The separation of presentation from specification, automatic management of references, table of contents and being able
to include PDFs from external files (which get refreshed when you re-build the document) are all lifesavers.

Version Control: git (open source: Linux, Windows, OSX)

Just about the only version control system that: doesn’t damage the data you are trying to manage by adding dot-files into all of the directories, can routinely handle large files and can work productively without a network connection. Perforce is powerful central server commercial option (with the ability to have central policies, control and review).

I look forward to learning which of my choices are considered poor and what your must-haves are.

Related posts:

1. Exciting Technique #1: The “R” language.
2. “The Mythical Man Month” is still a good read
3. Microsoft Store Again