Copyright © 2004 Patrick McDermott UC Berkeley Extension

1. Brooks’ Law Adding Staff to a Late Software Project will make it Later. Chicken’s Pecking Order FSNP Brooks, Frederick P., Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20 th Anniversary Edition, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley ( ), 1995 (1975), p. 25.

2. Conservation of Complexity Simplicity is Complicated –John Naisbitt has observed that the computer is a tool that manages complexity, and as such, just as highways encourage more cars, the computer invites more complexity into society. Human Languages – 日本語 Japanese: No tense, number, gender –but Honorifics, Kanji 漢字 IRS –The Tax Code as we know it could not exist without computers –Technology was supposed to simplify our lives?!?

3. Cranes & Spandrels A Good Reason, a Bad Reason… –or No Reason At All Things are the Way They are because They got that Way: Vestigial Organs Hume’s Fallacy –Ought not Deducible from Is Stephen J. Gould Spandrels Patrick McDermott Cranes

4. Embrace Contradiction  The First Law of Logic for Analysts: Logic doesn’t always Work!  You can hide in plain sight.  If Everybody agrees, Somebody is Wrong!  There is no such thing as Nothing.  The greatest Truths are told in fiction.  To remember something, stop trying to remember it.  If you want something done, assign it to someone who is busy.  Dickens was right: This is the best of times, and the worst of times.

5. Hofstadter’s Law Mis-under-estimating It always takes longer than you expect, even when taking into account Hofstadter’s Law Douglas Hofstadter, Author of: – I Am a Strange Loop –Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid –The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul –Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought –Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language

6. K.I.S.S. Keep it Simple, Stupid! Occam’s Razor— –Given 2 equally likely alternatives –Choose the one with the fewest assumptions –i.e. the simplest. “Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.” — Widely attributed to Alan Kay Newton, Harry, Newton’s Telecom Dictionary, 22nd Edition, San Francisco: CMP Books ( ), 2006.

7. Laziness Unleashed A Good Programmer is a Lazy Programmer Eric S. Raymond: –“An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness.” –“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)” Don’t do anything twice How do you avoid an accident while backing ?

8. Lubarsky’s Law Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology There’s Always Another Bug Amelia Earhardt Typos in riting No perfect Kata Linus’s Law –Given Enough Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow Linus Torvalds (Linus of Linux)

9. The Middle Way  Best of Both Worlds  Goldilocks, Super Systems Analyst  Bad Ideas are just Good Ideas carried to Extreme  Use it to Your Advantage –Too much, What you want, Too little

10. Moore’s Law Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder Computing Power doubles every 18 Months Trend has held for three decades Will we Hit the Wall??

Human Smartest? “Before [the 21 st ] century is over “human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet.” Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, New York: Viking ( ), “There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three-dimensional chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns [Moore’s Law] going for a long time.” “Once a computer achieves a human level of intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it.”