Computers may be taking over the world, but the people who write their
instructions still suffer job insecurity. In The Rise and Resurrection of the
American Programmer (Prentice Hall, £12.50, ISBN 0 13 121831 X), Edward
Yourdon looks for solutions as code becomes a commodity, cheaper to buy in India
than in the US. One idea is deliberately to market software that is only just
bug-free enough for its job. But the big hope is the Internet, where the US can
still dazzle the opposition with uncommon creativity.
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