brian will . net

“Quality”, i.e. Why software is hard

Yahoo’s Javascript guru, Douglas Crockford, has another excellent video talk (watchable in-browser or as a download), this time a survey of software engineering titled “Quality”. While general pontifications of this nature are common, Crockford’s strikes a nice balance between breadth and concision and between correctness and novelty (not too dull, not too narrow, etc.), and, in fact, the talk would be quite watchable and interesting for neophyte programmers and perhaps even non-programmers. On the downside, Crockford doesn’t really give prescriptions, but that follows from his main point: we still haven’t really solved or mitigated some hard problems (and perhaps we never will); for now, the only real consensus we have is that you’re better off aware of these issues than not.