Rage Crack Skidrow The thought experiment is simply to imagine what would happen to such a group without management. Barring miracles, it would collapse or drift apart very quickly. At the same time, and not entirely coincidentally, the development of so-called "high level" programming languages meant that one could write a program once, in one language, and have it automatically translated ("compiled") to run on different kinds of computers. Things won't simply run themselves, much as we might wish otherwise. But the management, though it may be quite active, is of`ten informal, subtle, and low-key. Rage Crack Skidrow The only thing keeping a development group together is their shared belief that they can do more in concert than individually. Thus the goal of management is mostly to ensure that they continue to believe this, by setting standards for communications, by making sure useful developers don't get marginalized due to personal idiosyncracies, and in general by making the project a place developers want to keep coming back to. Rage Crack Skidrow Specific techniques for doing this are discussed throughout the rest of this book.