Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ukma!psuvm.bitnet!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Who builds tools?
Message-ID: <40335UH2@PSUVM>
Date: 25 Apr 88 14:39:46 GMT
References: <321@uwslh.UUCP>
Organization: Penn Sate Erie--School of Business
Lines: 11

In the Mysthical Man-Month, Brooks describes the surgical-team model
for programming projects, where one person is responsible for all of the
code.  Of course, to make this possible, we have to offload as much
work as possible from the "surgeon".  One way to do that is to give
every a surgeon a ToolSmith, who builds tools for the surgeon so that
he doesn't have to build them hirself.

Put in a broader perspective, maybe every project ought to have someone
who, while not being good at the techniques the final code will contain,
IS good with tools and tool building.  In the traditional Unix environment,
a project should contain at least one person whose *specialty* is awk, emacs,
shell, yacc, etc etc etc.