Three Questions for Microsoft Researcher Leslie Lamport on the Breakthroughs in Distributed Computing that Won Him the Turing Award | MIT Technology Review

Excerpt from a timely software reality check

"More recently, you have worked on ways to improve how software is built. What’s wrong with how it’s done now?
People seem to equate programming with coding, and that’s a problem. Before you code, you should understand what you’re doing. If you don’t write down what you’re doing, you don’t know whether you understand it, and you probably don’t if the first thing you write down is code. If you’re trying to build a bridge or house without a blueprint—what we call a specification—it’s not going to be very pretty or reliable. That’s how most code is written. Every time you’ve cursed your computer, you’re cursing someone who wrote a program without thinking about it in advance."

Three Questions for Microsoft Researcher Leslie Lamport on the Breakthroughs in Distributed Computing that Won Him the Turing Award | MIT Technology Review