Posts in category

Design


The natural tendency for things to tangle may help explain the three-dimensional nature of the universe and how it formed. A team of physicists has developed an out-of-the-box theory: shortly after the universe popped into existence 13.8 billion years ago it was filled with knots formed from flexible strands of energy called flux tubes that …

I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about so=ware engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally di:erent development styles, the “cathedral” model of most of the commercial world versus the “bazaar” model of the Linux …

Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any–no inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity what electronics, transistors, and large-scale integration did for computer hardware. We cannot expect ever to see twofold gains every two years.