08.22.07
software quality
“Our experiments to date suggest that by far the biggest quality factor in software remains the developer’s ability, and, in most experiments, analysts regularly record variations of a factor of 10 or more in the individuals’ performance. This appears to have little to do with any technology or even languages they might use.”
- Les Hatton, Kingston University, “The Chimera of Software Quality”, IEEE Computer, August 2007
P.S. This has not much to do with the above quotation, but I have to mention it. Quoted from the same paper: “I am a computational fluid dynamicist by training, …” That is really cool and encouraging to me. Don’t ask why.
08.19.07
it is a fact, not a shame
The program itself is the only complete description of what the program will do.
– P.J. Davis
algorithm
“In many applications, algorithm plays almost no role,
and certainly presents almost no problem.” – C.A.R. Hoare
This was quoted in the Millo paper.
program verification and mathematics
”Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs”
This 1979 paper by Millo et al is a great reading for programmers. Here is a PDF file.
“mathematicians publish 200,000 papers every years. A number of these are subsequently contradicted or otherwise disallowed, others are thrown into doubt, and most are ignored. Only a tiny fraction come to be understood and believed by any sizable group of mathematicians.”
