Semergence

A lot of gems in Software Is Hard, some choice examples:

The Ninety-Ninety Rule : “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”

and

Rosenberg’s Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new.

and

Alan Kay, the father of Smalltalk: “Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

and

Weinberg’s Second Law: “If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.”