CHAPTER 1

"Revenge of the SpaghettiOs"

p. 3

A shift-devil, she called it: These thoughts from one of the first serious programmers I spoke to, one of those who (without knowing it) convinced me to go further: the inimitable coder/writer Ellen Ullman, whose books, especially Close to the Machine, I can't recommend highly enough. All programmers speak of needing "clearly defined boundaries between things" in their work but Ullman speaks specifically of the necessity of "defined interfaces."