3 Jul
2024
3 Jul
'24
9:37 p.m.
On 7/3/24 8:17 AM, Vincenzo Nicosia wrote:
I think it would be terribly misleading to teach young
CS students that
software projects should be managed "as Unix v6 came to life". They will
never, ever find anything even close to that environment in a
professional workplace. We should tell them that some of the most
beautiful software projects ever crafted by humans did not come out of
the "professionalism churches" that the overwhelming majority of
software companies are nowadays, based on the blind application of
"mainstream" software development and project management principles,
according to which they (the CS majors) are just "as fungible and
replaceable as a chair, or a wallpaper". That would be only true and
fair to tell them.
I was inside Apple for a LONG time, and if you were going to write a
horror story case history, the Mac OS would be it, right through the
death march that occurred during the OS X transition (bringing this
around to Unix history). You don't hear anything about the people
past the "Magnificent Seven" of the original Mac team. There were
many and many people were burned out in the process, including almost
all of the original team one way or another.