An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows
he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great
restraint.
As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment
after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used "next
time". Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect,
with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems,
is ready to build a second system.
This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When
he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each
other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences
will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not
generalizable.
The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all
the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.
The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile".
Unix /yoo'niks/ n.
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun
on Multic very early on it was `UNICS'] (also `UNIX') An
interactive time-sharing system invented in 1969 by Ken Thompson
after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he could
play games on his scavenged PDP-7....
