Rise And Resurrection Of The American Programmer

"Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer" by EdwardYourdon.

Interesting, but scrappy.

More like pathetic. Theme of book: "Remember what I said in DeclineAndFallOfTheAmericanProgrammer? Well, never mind."

Latest EY flip flop. After appearing on TV saying that he was moving out to the desert for Y2K, he wrote an article for IEEE Software ( or was it IEEE Computer ) saying that the overexurberance of Y2K prognosticators should not be used to play down the real problems revealed by Y2K.

ThaddeusOlczyk

I think Ed has lost it personally. It seems that many of the great names lose it over time. Perhaps that is inevitable for those who philosophise on the industry.

I don't know. He wrote DeathMarch after Rise And Resurrection, and I thought it was a reasonably astute commentary on the state of SoftwareDevelopment at the time it was written. --RandyStafford

Reminiscent of one of ClarkesLaws,''When a great scientist says that something is possible, he very probably is right. If he says something is impossible, he's almost certainly wrong."

Halfway through reading it now, I'm still waiting for the "rise and resurrection" part. But in endorsing "Good Enough" software, is EdwardYourdon actually singing the praises of ExtremeProgramming? That would seem to be similar to his idea of exposing best practices from the bottom of the organization. It's hard to tell, I'll let you know when I finish the book. --MarkSchumann

It seems the trend is toward overseas outsourcing again, something he apparently predicted wouldn't happen much. Perhaps it is cyclical.

See also: InternationalOutsourcing

The way I understood it, Edward Yourdon didn't predict it wouldn't happen much, he predicted that in the long term US-based programmers would still have the edge due to more modern (dare I say "agile"?) tools. I wasn't convinced; it's not as though only Americans can use VisualBasic and JavaLanguage. --MarkSchumann, after having finished the book

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