{"id":1303,"date":"2012-03-03T20:56:59","date_gmt":"2012-03-04T04:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1303"},"modified":"2012-03-03T20:56:59","modified_gmt":"2012-03-04T04:56:59","slug":"review-the-mythical-man-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1303","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Mythical Man-Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month<\/em> is a book that software designers often hear mentioned in respectful tones.\u00a0 This is Fred Brooks, one of the architects of the old mammoth IBM operating systems of the 1970’s discussing his lessons learned from those projects and applying them to general software engineering.\u00a0 It is rightly praised for spending the lion’s share of its content on coordinating people rather than coordinating computers.<\/p>\n

Academically, it lives up to its reputation quite well.\u00a0 The edition I have includes retrospective chapters written 10 and 20 years after the initial publication.\u00a0 In one of these Brooks mentions asking an airplane row-mate who did not know him and was reading The Mythical Man-Month<\/em> what the fellow thought of it.\u00a0 The fellow replied that there was nothing in it he didn’t already know.\u00a0 While Brooks is disappointed, I think it is high praise.\u00a0 He has taken an arcane topic and made it accessible to the point where readers think they’ve had all these ideas themselves.\u00a0 By and large they haven’t.<\/p>\n

While it is well worth reading and understanding this book if you have any interest in managing large scale creative endeavors there is no question that it is a product of its time.\u00a0 Discussions of productivity are given in terms of machine instructions and cautions about overflowing resident memory abound.\u00a0 PL\/I is put forth as the only viable operating system programming language.\u00a0 For the student of computing it is a fascinating look at how these technologies – many of them obsolete – were viewed by their contemporaries.\u00a0 While these examples may confuse modern readers, the fundamental ideas are put forth with such clarity that the ancient examples are more an interesting side light than a barrier to understanding.<\/p>\n

It is also amazing to see how Brooks unapologetically refers to the Bible and religious teachings.\u00a0 He advocates two-person superior\/subordinate programming teams and while he makes an excellent technical argument for the arrangement, it is jarring to see the topic annotated in a summary with “Note God’s plan for marriage.”\u00a0 The technical arguments do not rest on theology, but it is surprising to modern eyes to see the references.<\/p>\n

Overall, this is a classic that deserves its reputation and adds the joys of a unique voice and\u00a0 historical perspective.<\/p>\n

Strongly recommended.\u00a0 (A must for software people.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month is a book that software designers often hear mentioned in respectful tones.\u00a0 This is Fred Brooks, one of the architects of the old mammoth IBM operating systems of the 1970’s discussing his lessons learned from those projects and applying them to general software engineering.\u00a0 It is rightly praised for spending […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1303"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1307,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1303\/revisions\/1307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}