Antoine Lyset

ALT Moreover, for each class of tool that could exist, one would have to effectively anticipate all possible innovations. Brooks' strategy for this was to look at existing categories of tools and state, for each, that they would be ineffective or that they were effective but played out. This was wrong not only because it underestimated gains from classes of tools that didn't exist yet, weren't yet effective, or he wasn't familiar with (e.g., he writes off formal methods, but it doesn't even occur to him to mention fuzzers, static analysis tools that don't fully formally verify code, tools like valgrind, etc.) but also because Brooks thought that every class of tool where there was major improvement was played out and it turns out that none of them were (e.g., programming languages). In some sense, this isn't too different from when we looked at Unix and found the Unix mavens saying that we should write software like they did in the 70s and that the languages they invented are as safe a...