L Peter Deutsch: Everyone Will Need to Become Computer Li...

You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is. sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have dial telephones. Someone extrapolated the growth rate and said, "My God. By 20 or years from now, every single person will have to be a telephone operator." Well, that's what happe...

 L Peter Deutsch on Software as a Capital Asset Versus Exp...

The problem being the old saying in the business: "fast, cheap, good—pick any two." If you build things fast and I you have some way of building them inexpensively, it's very unlikely that they're going to be good. But this s|s school of thought says you shouldn't expect software to last. I think behind this perhaps is a mindset of software as expense vs. software as capital asset. I'm very much in the software-as-capital-asset school. When I was working at ParcPlace and Adele Goldberg was...

 L Peter Deutsch: Computer Science is Not Science

I have a little bit of a rant about computer science also. I could make a pretty strong case that the word science should not be applied to computing. I think essentially all of what's called computer science is some combination of engineering and applied mathematics. I think very little of it is science in terms oft of the scientific process, is, where what you're doing is developing better descriptions of observed phenomena.

 L Peter Deutsch on Why Programing is so Hard

One of the things that I've been thinking about off and on over the last five-plus years is, "Why is programming so hard?" You have the algorithmic side of programming and that's i close enough to mathematics that you can use mathematics as the basic model, if you will, for what goes on in it. You can use mathematical methods and mathematical ways of thinking.That doesn't make it easy, but nobody thinks mathematics is easy. So there's a pretty good match between the material you're working ...