Chapter�5.�Textuality

Chapter�5.�Textuality: "It's a well-known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occurred in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea.
-- Tom Galloway rec.arts.comics, February 1992 "

Compactness and Orthogonality

Compactness and Orthogonality: "The purpose of emphasizing compactness as a virtue is not to condition you to treat compactness as an absolute requirement, but to teach you to do what Unix programmers do: value compactness properly, design for it whenever possible, and not throw it away casually."

Compactness and Orthogonality

Compactness and Orthogonality: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information [Miller] is one of the foundation papers in cognitive psychology (and, incidentally, the specific reason that U.S. local telephone numbers have seven digits). It showed that the number of discrete items of information human beings can hold in short-term memory is seven, plus or minus two. This gives us a good rule of thumb for evaluating the compactness of APIs: Does a programmer have to remember more than seven entry points? Anything larger than this is unlikely to be strictly compact."

Encapsulation and Optimal Module Size

Encapsulation and Optimal Module Size: "Brooks's Law predicts that adding programmers to a late project makes it later. More generally, it predicts that costs and error rates rise as the square of the number of programmers on a project."