Chapter 15

Conclusion

"We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it."

-Claude Shannon

This Claude Shannon quote is controversial and usually generates interesting conversations. The main observation is this: we don't really have full control of the future. That's actually a meaningful observation if we consider the latter portion of the quote about the future at a higher philosophical level (our inability to change the past being much less debatable).

What if we apply the latter portion of the quote to software development? Theoretically, in software development, we fully control the future, in that it's the way we are going to write the next piece of code. And the amount of control we have is proportional to how much we understand and how effectively we can act on the code base. In your code, the control you can have over your future is deeply connected to how you have been building in the past.

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