Peter Norvig: From Books to Paragraphs

You look at Knuth's original Literate Programming, and he's really trying to say, "What's the best order for writing a book," assuming that someone's going to read the whole book and he wants it to be in a logical order. People don't do that anymore. They don't want to read a book, they want an index so they can say, "What's die least amount of this book that I have to read? I just want to find the three paragraphs that I need. Show me that and then I'll move on." I think that's a real change.

 Peter Norvig: How Well Does the Program Run When it Isn't...

And think about failure modes—I remember one of the great lessons I got about programming was when I showed up at the airport at Heathrow, and there was a power failure and none of the computers were working. But my plane was on time. Somehow they had gotten print-outs of all the flights. 1 don't know where—there must have been some computer off-site, i don't know whether they printed them that morning or if they had a procedure of always printing them the night before and sending them ...