16 lines
878 B
Plaintext
16 lines
878 B
Plaintext
second-system effect
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n. (sometimes, more euphoniously, second-system syndrome ) When one is
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designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful
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system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design
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an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred
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Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
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(Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN 0-201-00650-2). It described the jump from a set
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of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the
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360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see
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Brooks's Law , creeping elegance , creeping featurism. See also Multics ,
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OS/2 , X , software bloat. This version of the jargon lexicon has been
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described (with altogether too much truth for comfort) as an example of
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second-system effect run amok on jargon-1....
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