What Changed in 50 Years of Computing: Part 1
How has the classic book on software engineering, ‘The Mythical Man Month,’ aged with time, and is it still relevant half a century on – or does it belong in a museum, alongside floppy discs?
‘The Mythical Man Month’ by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. is a bona fide classic in the software industry. First published in 1975, and with an updated edition in 1995, the text is almost 50 years old. Lots of time has passed, yet the book is still relevant.
The title of the book takes aim at the “myth” that software development can be measured in “man months,” which Brooks disproves in the pages that follow:
“Cost [of the software project] does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth.”
I’ve been making my way through this book from software’s earliest days and taking notes of what’s remained the same in the 50 years since Mythical Man Month came out, which predictions the book got right or wrong, and what’s different about engineering today.
The author worked at IBM as a project manager of the OS/360 operating system, one of the most complex software projects in the world, at the time. Possibly the book’s most famous insight is that adding manpower to a software project that’s already behind schedule will delay it even more – which likely comes from Brooks’ personal experience at a big company. This insight seems obvious to many of us today, but it was Brooks who saw it first, which speaks to why the book still matters.
In today’s issue, we cover reflections on Chapters 1-3 of the book:
A criticism of the book: gendered language
Joys and woes of programming, then and now
Why do we ship faster now than in 1975?
Does “Brooks’s law” still apply?
Do we spend more time coding than 50 years ago?
The “10x engineer,” then and now
1. A criticism of the book: gendered language
One thing modern readers will notice is that only the male pronoun is used throughout. Brooks was writing in the early-mid 1970s, when there were plenty of women programmers in the field. Indeed, it’s estimated that in the 1960s between 30-50% of all programmers were women, by the book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans.
Despite the reality, the Mythical Man Month exists in a workplace populated entirely by other men. Every engineer is a “he,” and “he” does the programming, testing, and documenting. The invisibility of women in the text seems a puzzling omission today; second-wave feminists might say it illustrates why their struggle against engrained discrimination and inequality had to happen.
Women in software at the time included Jean E. Samme, who published the book Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals in 1969 – one of the most popular books in the field. Meanwhile, Margaret Hamilton was responsible for programming the onboard flight software for the Apollo space mission. Not only that, she’s also credited with coining the term, “software engineering.”
The absence of women was partially rectified in the later edition, in which four new chapters were added. The 1995 volume uses “people” instead of the male form, and drops “he” as the default gender.
Now, let’s reflect on the rest of the work.
2. Joys and woes of programming, then and now
In Chapter 1, “The Tar Pit,” Brooks asks why programming is fun, and gives five reasons: