stepwise

It's a stepwise process. The goal is to pick off small, achievable pieces, and then use them to build something more substantial.

I don't see it as a qualitative change, though, I see it as a series of smaller stepwise improvements.

There is nothing stepwise about a Pareto distribution. Maybe VC returns follow 80/20 and maybe they don't.

How do systems with interdependent processes and parts get produced by a process that seems to proceed stepwise?

They don't explain everything, but it should be enough to make clear that just because evolution works by "stepwise" changes that doesn't mean one step can't create huge differences.

Successful companies walk the surface, making stepwise reductions in this error rate. This often leads to a perfectly rational descent to a local optima.

We know that what works better is combining analysis and development: prototyping quick cycles and stepwise improvement. It rarely matter how good it is; it only matters that is exists on time and that it's good enough.

The point about being able to move stepwise up the hardware complexity ladder by progressively replacing microcode with gates is a really good one, though.

[1] It's usually stepwise, not a single line, but the same idea holds [2] The "demonstrated financial need" can also be very easily abused by the affluent. I know one student who received very heavy financial aid, despite her family being incredibly well-off.

But the PostgreSQL team are doing their usual slow, stepwise refinement approach to implementing these features from the primitives and moving up. I expect that in a few versions they'll be at sufficient feature parity with MySQL on this front that anyone who cares enough is the sort of person who decides between Oracle RAC and Teradata.

I would say the two professions are more alike than credit is given, and working as a programmer in a lawyer-heavy firm, I've often been told by those in the legal profession that programmers have the ability to think logically stepwise through law more clearly than others.

This kind of thinking gets very unappealing when you realize that for all its flaws, the world seems to work fairly well as it is--and that empirically-based, stepwise improvement on the status quo is a safer and more reliable way to go than hoping some ideology is going to work better.