No-one is more dangerous than the supervisor of a failed system, who abandons the system, but keeps the loot: A position of power.
I saw that quote on the 1956 anti-communist students’ rebellion memorial in Budapest. (read: Buda-pesht. There is no such city as “buda-pest”. It’s a transliteration error.)
Without mentioning names, I can think of several engineering and programming practices that can fall into this category: Mistakes that are too collosal to admit; Practices that give power to the supervisor but no merit to the practitioner.
In the spirit of Tom Gilb, any development method should by itself be subject to development. Keep that in mind next time someone declares “the ultimate programming methodology” or “the last programming language we’ll ever need”.
(Btw: COBOL has just celebrates its 50th birthday.)
Just FMI (on the analogy to ‘FYI’): was COBOL proclaimed “the last programming language we’ll ever need”?
And +1 on the Budapest thing, yeah.
I don’t know about COBOL, but FORTRAN – The first programming language – Was also claimed to be the last: Now that we have FORTRAN, we won’t need programmers (read: People who code in assembly) any more, normal people (read: People who don’t know assembly) can write programs!
At those naive days, coding in a high-level language was considered simple enough in order to NOT be counted as a profession.