I'm sensing a bait-and-switch here. He starts by addressing Patrick's article, which is specifically about the "90% of programming jobs ... creating Line of Bu

I'm sensing a bait-and-switch here. He starts by addressing Patrick's article, which is specifically about the "90% of programming jobs ... creating Line of Business software". Then he turns around and quotes from the NASA Apollo project, and Donald Knuth. Are these examples of this type of software? Are they relevant? TeX took decades to write, and not only does he have no customers, no requirements, and no unit tests, but the author pays people out of pocket when they find a bug. It took him over a decade to make a stable release, and he's barely made any changes to the software since then. Oh, and it's all free. I'm struggling to think of how a person could be any worse at business! Once you admit that there are radically different types of 'programming' in the world, you shouldn't be quoting from the opposite kind to support your cause. This reads like the McDonald's operations manual quoting Julia Child. They both work with food but words like "quality" or "efficiency" will have completely different meanings in these two contexts. Knuth has many useful things to say about software, but his oft-quoted aphorism was not telling you how to make your business succeed. Are you also going to rewrite your software from scratch after 5 years once you've learned what the hard parts are?