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Parnas, Lamport, and metaphor
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parnas-lamport-metaphor.md

21 May 2023

Parnas, Lamport, and metaphor

Two giants. Both wrong. Tell me why.

Parnas: Software ages and decays and must be maintained, even corrected. https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~yfcai/CS451/RequiredReadings/SoftwareAging.pdf

Lamport: Software is a mathematical expression. Its correctness never changes. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/automobile.pdf

Why

Nothing in my teaching is more difficult to get across than the simple: "Throw that metaphor away; it's the wrong metaphor." -- Northrop Frye, "Expanding Eyes", 1976.

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