"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
Frederick Brooks: conceptual unity requires tiny teams with one mind in charge. Eric Raymond: the team can be of any size, given sufficient comms tech and leadership by one mind.
Prediction: the technology of expression will improve to the extent that any number of minds can lead.
Oliver
I’d like to share with you a section from the famous book on software creation (and creation generally): The Mythical Man Month, by Fredrick Brooks. Why? This particular section is a proud example of our habit, as a species, of letting our tools dampen and simplify our thinking, rather than taking the time to build tools that are ideisomorphic—that is, sensitive enough to represent human thought—or even to build tools that actually expand the compass of cognition.
Oliver
“Indeed, one of the ways of establishing conceptual control over such structure [software plans as richly connected network graphs] is to enforce link cutting until one or more of the graphs becomes hierarchical.”—Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Brooks, usually profound, of course misses that you can have coherence without hierarchy, and that to cut a link is to destroy information.
Oliver
