He also referred to Donald Knuth's concept of Literate Programming, and Harlan Mills’ surgical team concept, which recognizes the fact that certain programmers can be as much as 10 or 100 times as productive as others. High performing developers are provided with a support team, which Crockford updates to include a co-pilot, a writer, a “language lawyer” - someone with a deep understanding of the language being used, a buildmeister, toolsmith, testers and interns. (Mind you, Dave Delay thought way back in 2005 that Mills’ perceived need for all those people just to support one programmer had been obviated by automation.)

One of the most powerful arguments for caring about software quality, at least from a business standpoint, is almost glossed over in the presentation. Crockford points out that for a company like Yahoo!, the state of the code base has a significant impact on the company's valuation. They look at two aspects of code quality: coding conventions (aka coding standards), and macro architecture. They have found that the easiest win for improving code quality is to improve readability. His suggestion (although he didn’t actually say whether they do this at Yahoo! or not) is that every 7th sprint, no features are added to the code; you focus on clean-up. Crockford ends by noting that security and simplicity go hand in hand: a way to make your code more secure is to simplify it.

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