The Prescient Fred Brooks

(This post courtesy of my discovering a store of unfinished, half-written blog posts hanging out on my hard drive.)

A fair while ago, I read The Mythical Man-month, a truly legendary tome in software engineering. While the maxims, rules, and expertise it contains are what make it a classic, I was astonished at the accuracy of the predictions that Brooks laid out in an out-of-the-way table near the back of the book: (p203, Fig 16.1)

Exciting Products:

Yes

• Unix
• APL
• Pascal
• Modula
• Smalltalk
• Fortran

No

• Cobol
• PL/1
• Algol
• MVS/370
• MS-DOS