The Morning Summary, 6/16- Huizenga Part VI

The numbers have fallen.  Yes, I was afraid of that.   Not much time.

I want to get to this quickly, so let's begin right away.

Here's a direct quote from Huizenga's book

Secrecy tends to breed careless mistakes and second rate science and is detrimental to advancing scientific knowledge.

This is a clue into this man's thinking.  Secrecy can be bad, I suppose, but it the assertion of second rate science may be a little too much.  The Manhattan Project was pretty secret, I understand.

Bill Gates wrote a Basic interpreter for one of the early personal computers that evidently was first rate.  He didn't have a large team in those days.

Albert Einstein may have produced the Theory of Relativity on his own.

It may be possible to go on and on giving examples of how first rate works can be produced without having to work in a large team and collaborating with others.  In fact, I had the impression that the best stuff is often done by individuals.  It could be science or it could be art.

No doubt that there are advantages to having large teams, but that doesn't guarantee first rate work.  The book, the Mythical Man Month describes how IBM 360 Operating System became such an expensive project and required far more effort to produce.  Here's a quote from Amazon's page about the book

The classic book on the human elements of software engineering. Software tools and development environments may have changed in the 21 years since the first edition of this book, but the peculiarly nonlinear economies of scale in collaborative work and the nature of individuals and groups has not changed an epsilon. [emphasis added]

That doesn't appear to necessarily be first rate.  Contrast that with Bill Gates' work mentioned above.

Anyway, that's about all I can write right now.  I am up to about 90 pages in this book.  It is a slow process since I have little time.  But I am getting there.  Thanks for coming by.