The Mythical Monkey-Month

chromatic on 2006-05-19T22:07:01

I want to write a book called The Mythical Monkey-Month. It will argue against the apparently common illusion that, given a language with such enterprisey features as static type checking and compile-time provability, you can hire barely-trained monkeys and solve actual business problems well.

I do believe in correlation between the capabilities of a language its environment and higher levels of productivity, but bitter experience has taught me that there are no technical solutions sufficient to protect against incompetent or at least malicious developers.

(See the Perl Monks thread Perl in the Enterprise to play logical fallacy anonymonk bingo within this subject area.)


a heap of monkeys

mr_bean on 2006-05-20T07:32:07

It was said a million monkeys on a million
typewriters would eventually write the works
of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
we know this is not so. --Robert Wilensky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

Computer science was created by a mass of
monkeys all trying to stand on each
other's shoulders.

If I did not see further as a programmer, it
was because of all those monkeys standing on
my shoulders.