I read the mythical man month recently and the examples often involving OS/360 development are brutally outdated. I couldn't relate and I had to force myself to finish.
"A team of two, with one leader , is often the best use of minds. [Note God's plan for marriage.]'"
That is only sexist if he is saying that the man is naturally the leader. Did he say that?
For thousands of years, certainly in European culture, the default human entity, when not specified, was masculine in gender. By which I mean grammatical gender, not the current politically vogue meaning of "gender."
We don't need to disregard thousands of years of knowledge because the authors were unaware of what would be PC in their future. That would be puerile. ("Childish," from the Latin word for "boy.")
I think you mean "puerile", not "childish."
"Child" comes from Proto-Germanic. https://www.etymonline.com/word/child says "no certain cognates outside Germanic".
The Latin word for boy is "puer": "a boy, lad (typically between ages 7-14 but could be younger) (older than an infans but younger than an adulescens)" - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/puer#Noun_4 .
Puerile comes "from Latin puerilis "boyish; childish,"'- https://www.etymonline.com/word/puerile .
Grammatic gender doesn't always match natural gender even in the European languages. "Wīfman" means "woman" in Old English but is grammatically masculine. The Old English "mann" meant generally "person". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mann#Old_English making "wīfmann" a female person and "wæpnedmann" a male person, though "wer" was the usual word for "adult male" (remaining in "weregild" and "werewolf").
In modern Swedish there is no masculine gender, and "man" can mean either "an adult male" or "a person". Consider "Hysterektomi ... kan också göras om man har cellförändringar eller cancer i livmodern." which in English is "A hysterectomy can also be done if one has cell changes or cancer in the uterus." (from https://www.1177.se/behandling--hjalpmedel/operationer/opera... ).
The Swedish "man" in that sentence translates directly as "one" in English, not "adult male", though usually in English we would write "you" as a sort of third-person pronoun, over the more formal "one" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You#Third_person_usage , even when we don't know if the reader has a uterus.
[edit] With Economist link: https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/03/23/editing-roald-d...
Old books at their essence lets us talk to people from the past. We won't always like what they have to say, but they will speak about themselves and highlight how we've changed. If we can't understand where we came from, then we can't hope to understand how we got where we are.
Anyway, point is, tons of books are changed after publication. I don't see why The Mythical Man Month shouldn't be; the technology is out of date and the gender issues are out of date.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Writes-Improved-Go-Ridiculo...
[2] https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/12/13/how-jrr-tolkien-pull...
Most books don't age well.
I tried to read Baum's "The Woggle-Bug Book" a few years ago, and found its humor, rooted in old ethnic stereotypes, totally un-enjoyable. It did not age well.
While the Hardy Boy books I enjoyed as a kid wouldn't have been so wildly popular had they kept the original text. ("From 1959 to 1973, the first 38 books were extensively revised, largely to remove depictions of racial stereotypes" says Wikipedia.)
One of the most popular Agatha Christie novels is "And Then There Were None". That was "re-published to align with the political zeitgeist" so much they even changed the title and the name of the island. Most people have read the re-aligned version, not the original version.
And as I learned recently, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" was "re-published to align with the political zeitgeist" in the 1970s, due to complaints by the NAACP and others that the Oompa-Loompas were African Pygmies. The re-write made them white, and the movie made them orange. The re-aligned version has outsold the original version.
Also in the 1970s, Geisel ("Dr. Seuss") edited "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" to change how it describes and portrays a Chinese man. That book continues to be sold.
Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was revised in the 1981 edition to reflect the new feminist zeitgeist. For examples, "insurance man" was replaced with "insurance agent", and "leadership gravitates to the man who can talk" changed to "leadership gravitates to the person who can talk". It also dropped the section on marriage. ("Never get married until you have kissed the Blarney Stone. Praising a woman before marriage is a matter of inclination. But praising one after you marry her is a matter of necessity — and personal safety.") The preface to the 1981 edition points out how "Carnegie himself was a tireless reviser of his own work during his lifetime" and would have made changes because he was "sensitive to the changing currents of present-day life".
While not "tons of books", the fact that I - with little knowledge of book publishing history - can point to several counter-examples, suggests that there are a lot more popular books out there which were updated to the modern zeitgeist.
I would also like to offer an additional counterpoint: Leaving work intact will, not only preserve the work "as is", but also contribute to future historians the true sociological impression that is aptly accurate for their time period.
Bentley's Programming Pearls, by that standard, is also "brutally outdated" - but the point of the book is not "how do I make this work in early 1980s technology"
The point of PP is "ask the right question"
The point of MMM is "add resources when necessary; be brutally minimalistic about how many resources are added"
I’d rather read a 2023 version if I could.
If anything, having "outdated" acronyms and names may actually make the message stronger - because you don't need to be distracted by what they "are", you can just accept they exist[ed] :)
Architecture can change quite a bit too - all the async webs make things difficult. Most of the bug reports we get on mobile are not test coverable. e.g. some jankiness when going back to a page, or something like liking a post three levels down and finding that your like was not registered when you go back towards the home screen. We had some bugs like an OS modding text animations, making the text invisible in very niche situations. Then you have combos of ltr and rtl languages and layouts. Adding test coverage can be 4x the effort of writing the code once with no tests, not to mention the architecture for test support making things exponentially more complex.
Maybe we have to rethink what complete code really means.