“Present-day applications are rather different in many respects. Present-day programs are often very large and are being developed by teams that collaborate over periods spanning several years. These teams may be scattered across the globe. The programmers are not the future users of the system they develop and they have no expert knowledge of the application area in question. The problems that are being tackled increasingly concern everyday life: automatic bank tellers, airline reservation, salary administration, electronic commerce, automotive systems, etc. Putting a man on the moon was not conceivable without computers.”

—  Hans van Vliet

Source: Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, 2007, p. 2

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Hans van Vliet5
Dutch computer scientist 1949

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