Edsger W. Dijkstra, a giant of computer science, wrote an article long ago arguing that the “goto” statement was bad for programmers and the programs they wrote. Week 2 of Code Reads covers this article.

The statement “goto is bad” is exactly the kind of attention getting statement that provokes internecine fights between partisans of various languages. Unfortunately, the flame-wars usually miss the most relevant points. I’m definitely in the “no silver bullet” school, in fact I’m in a sub-sect of that school that says “your choice of language in and of itself is almost irrelevant to the success of the project”. Obviously, Logo would be an inappropriate choice of language for building a web site, and for parsing log files Perl is a lot easier than Java. But the chief benefits of one language or another are using the skills of the people available, fitting in with a larger organization, and the availability of tools and libraries suitable for the job, not the language constructs.
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Since Scott Rosenberg seemed to have so much worth reading in his book, Dreaming in Code , I’ve decided to spend a few days catching up on the Code Reads section of his blog. He provides weekly links to various original sources of the field, which are followed by a discussion.

Week 1, discussing The Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks, starts the series out with what is undoubtedly one of the most important books in the field. Most famous for Brooks Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”, the book actually has quite a lot more to say about how to build software without getting caught in the “tar-pit” (his image) of perpetually slipping schedules.
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Just finished Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Fascinating book - well written, with some very interesting things to say.

For those of you who haven’t read it - read it. It’s a great introduction to both the very difficult problems of building large software systems, and also to a lot of the ideas try to alleviate those difficulties. Moreover, Scott doesn’t have an ax to grind, or a vision he’s trying to prosteletize - so it seems to provide a reliable, unbiased survey of the best thinking out there.
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