BONUS: a circle-centric reading of software development through the 1990s, plus screech owls

Oddly Influenced

Michael P. Farrell's Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (2001) describes how groups of people follow a trajectory from vague dislike of the status quo, to a sharpened criticism of it, to a shared vision (and supporting techniques) intended to displace it. The development of so-called "lightweight processes" in the 1990s can be viewed through that lens. I drag in a little discussion of binary oppositions as used in Lévi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology (1963) and later work.

Mentioned

• The first NATO Software Engineering Conference, 1968
• The SAGE air-defense network
• David L. Parnas and Paul C. Clements, “A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It”, 1986
• The Alphabet of Ben Sira. For the story of Lilith, see this episode of the Data Over Dogma podcast: "Lilith Unfair"
• Etymology of "sinister"
• Wulf Schiefenhövel, "Biased semantics for left and right in 50 Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages", 2013
• Edsger Dijkstra, "On anthropomorphism in science", 1985
• Edsger Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", 1975 (enthusiastically)
• Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, 1980
• Peter Adamson, "Plato's Phaedo" (podcast)
• John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis, 1977
• Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, 1999

Credit

The image of the screech owl is by permission of Erica Henderson. It was inspired by the "Doamurder, West Virginia (The Book of Genesis, Part 1)" episode of the Apocrypals podcast. I bought my Lilith T-shirt from their merch store, which also contains sticker versions, etc.