The Mythical Man-Month: The Tar Pit

                                          The Tar Pit

    No scene from prehistory isquite so vivid as that of the mortal struggles of great beasts in the tar pits.In the mind’s eye one sees dinosaurs, mammoths, and sabertoothed tigers struggling against the grip of the tar. The fiercer the struggle, the more entangling the tar, and no beast is so strong or so skillful but that he ultimately sinks.

    Large-system programming has over the past decade been such a tar pit, and many great and powerful beasts have thrashed violently in it. Most have emerged with running systems---few have met goals, schedules, and budgets. Large and small, massive or wiry, team after team has become entangled in the tar. No one thing seems to cause the difficulty---any particular paw can be pulled away. But the accumulation of simultaneous and interacting factors bring slower and slower motion. Everyone seems to have been surprised by the stickiness of the problem,and it is hard to discern the nature of it. But we must try to understand it if we are to solve it.

    Therefore let us begin by identifying the craft of system programming and the joys and woes inherent in it. 

    在焦油坑中，没有任何一个场景能够生动的描述史前的动物做出的殊死搏斗。在我们的想像中，觉得恐龙，猛犸，剑齿虎都是在坑中做斗争的，在这次猛烈的斗争中，越来越多的动物牵扯进来，但是到最后，即使是最强壮和最有本领的动物也未能幸免。

    在过去的十年间，大型的程序设计就类似于一个焦油坑，许多大型和超级野兽在里面做激烈的对抗。大型的系统在运行的时候暴露了很多问题，方向不明确，日程安排混乱，和预算不一致。无论是大型的还是小型的，巨大的或者细长的，都在一次一次的测验之后陷入了焦油坑。没有一件事情看起来能够造成困难的，在动物中，无论怎样特殊的爪子都是可以被推开的。但是在积累的同时相互作用的因素变得越来越慢。每个人似乎都被这个棘手的问题惊讶到了，以致于都很难去领悟它，但是如果我们可以解决它的话，那么就可以试着去理解它了。

    因此，就让我们开始认识一下工艺设计系统中包含的快乐和悲哀吧。