Just a collection of reading material I found interesting enough to tell others about, over the years …
It’s a long time since I read most of these, and as I put together this revue I realise I really must set some time aside to read them over again. I think it would be interesting to compare how far we have come in the meantime.
In the Beginning Was the Command Line - Neal Stephenson
I think I first read this on an early Linux distribution disk.
I don’t think I even knew who Neal Stephenson (author of numerous popular sci-fi books most notably “Snow Crash”) was when I read it. From mere recollection this essay discusses the enduring relevance of the command line in the face of emerging graphical user interfaces.
I thought it was insightful then, perhaps even provocative. It became foundational to my thinking around modalities of human-machine interaction.
Now it seems weirdly prescient; not only do we still have the command line, but it has evolved to a whole other level of sophistication to better address those classes of problems that Stephenson addresses.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond
aka “catb” - a foundational essay in open source culture. ESR as he is known to his friends paints a picture of two competing, yet complementary modes of software development. The centrally coordinated, meticulously planned, and beguilingly magnificent, top-down “Cathedral” style of software development on the one hand, and the street level, sprawling, messy but responsive, friendly, frothy and human “Bazaar” style of development.
The former could be exemplified by the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and other large software corporations; the latter being the free and open source software movements essentially, but also the shareware community and the variety of indispensable projects run by academia and enthusiasts.
It’s funny to see this come largely full circle nowadays, with big business openly embracing free software. The likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle nowadays actively use and contribute to the open source communities, and a lot of the larger free software projects are indeed driven by business consortia, and themselves come to resemble the cathedral.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/578/499?inline=1
They Write the Right Stuff - Charles Fishman
This is what it takes to release bug-free code. This is what it costs. An inside view of the software development processes that developed in an environment where failure was disastrous but money was not an object. To me, at this point in time nearly 30 years of improvements in processes and tooling, most of the software quality measures are almost normal now.
https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~kchang/comp6710/readings/They%20Write%20the%20Right%20Stuff.pdf
The Mythical Man-Month - Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
I read a few chapters of this as an undergraduate. I have always meant to read more. Published in 1975, the systems approach to analysing productivity as teams scale is timeless, and is still reflected in much of the best practice around today.
Beware of Snake Oil - Phil Zimmermann
Also on an early Linux disk. I’m really not certain why this drew me in, but it was an early lesson in cryptography, and just how mind-bogglingly complex, and controversial it can be.