On the economics of software

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On the economics of software

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ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes archive
Volume 32 , Issue 6 (November 2007) table of contents

COLUMN: Columns table of contents

Pages: 8 - 9

Year of Publication: 2007

ISSN:0163-5948

Author

Michael Wing

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

Source is not precious. One can go to code.google.com and download source by the gigabyte. That's a lot. It would take most people an entire career to read and appreciate a gigabyte of code. Reading one chapter of a book per hour or a 50,000 word novel in twelve hours corresponds to reading 1 billion characters in 20 years, at 40 hours per week. Wading through gigabytes of code to find the few lines that one cares about can take a long time. On the other hand, applications are valuable, because they do specific things for specific users. Working apps consist of specific bodies of source.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Pablo Picasso, "Guitar 1913," http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=38359
	2	Henry Petroski, Small Things Considered, Knopf, 2003.
	3	Jason Pontin, "Bjarne Stroustrup: The Problem with Programming," in Technology Review, January/February 2007.