Sunday, April 09, 2006

Software is hard

My motto for a lot of this blog is,
"Making software is easy, making it right is hard."


Well, I was certain others had thought of that sentiment before me, and now I have proof. Donald Knuth had this to say in a lecture, captured in a document of the American Mathematical Society.

...my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It’s harder than anything else I’ve ever had to do.

There you have it. Don't take my word for it, listen to the college professor.

Thanks to the gang at Joel Reddit for linking to the article. If you want to learn about the world of software, spend some time at this Reddit site. Great stuff.

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