Fowler, a Werewolf and no Silver Bullets

Fowler as a werewolf is just hilarious:



This is from the No Silver Bullet Reloaded Retrospective OOPSLA Panel 2007.

There are a lot of gems in the quote from this discussion! The sarcastic comments from Fowler alone are worth the read of the summary...

Reading the summary there seems to be a general consensus that there is really no silver bullet.

But this is also a dangerous consensus. As Bertrand Meyer (also in the summary) poses it:

... many people, especially managers, rejected new ideas of the ‘80s and ‘90s like OOP, because they did not believe the new technology proposed to them would have a serious impact on development ...

Using the insight, that there is no silver bullet as an excuse to stop trying to improve is certainly not the way to go!

I was a student of Bertrand Meyer at university, and he was a critic of Fred Brooks paper, because he claimed that it was smothering innovation and the desire for improvement.

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