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

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 CreditThe 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.