John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering

With the NASA style devel­op­ment process, they can deliver very very low bug rates, but it’s at a very very low pro­duc­tiv­ity rate I wonder how many non-developers understand this. I, along with the rest of my team, am trained in PSP (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/00tr022.cfm) and TSP (http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tsp/) and we use it in our day-to-day development. It definitely helps us keep our defect rate below one bug/kLOC but it's an expensive process that results in very low LOC/day…

Very good essay. However, Carmac's view that there is very little quantified info about what works and what doesn't overlooks the work of software engineering practitioners, such as Capers Jones, who has long studied projects quantitatively and published detailed statistics on the effectiveness of different development approaches. His book "The Economics of Software Quality" is an excellent summary of his findings across thousands of projects. Reading it is like the first time you run a profiler and you realize…

"I would like to be able to enable even more restric­tive sub­sets of lan­guages and restrict pro­gram­mers even more because we make mis­takes con­stantly." I like this very much. For all the talk of power in languages, we make lots of mistakes. One underlooked decision factor in choosing languages should be, "How hard is to make accidental mistakes?" and "How easy is it to find and fix mistakes?"

Something wrong with dup detection? I submitted this link after this one, but HN didn't redirect me to this one. My later one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211380 This and my later link look the same to me: https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-and-science-of-software-engineering/ https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-and-science-of-software-engineering/