smart stuff

300 engineers take forever writing anything
19 Apr 05 - http://www.approximity.com/cgi-bin/blogtariAgile/index.rb/XP_agile/300Programmers.rdoc
Nice post by Elizabeth D. Rather
 Heh, that reminds me of a time in the late 70's, when IBM came out with a
 new "mini-computer".  We put Forth on it for a customer.  Our standard
 system came with a database capability, multitasker, multi-user support,
 lots of other features.  Another customer was considering this machine, and
 we made a presentation on our software.  Some IBM engineers were also there.
 They said, "This machine has only been on the market for a few months.  We
 have 300 engineers writing software for it in Boca Raton (Florida), and they
 only have a macro assembler and simple executive running so far.  How could
 you have done all this with only one engineer?"

 Well, I said something about having a standard design implemented in high
 level that was easy to port, but of course the real answer is that 300
 engineers would take forever writing anything!