Charles Simonyi, _Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method_
> Simonyi’s 1977 dissertation, “Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method.” Simonyi proposed a new approach to “optimizing productivity,” in which one lead programmer, or “meta-programmer,” designed a product and defined all its terms, then handed off a blueprint to “technicians,” worker-bee programmers who would do the implementation. Simonyi aimed to escape Brooks’s Law by forbidding the technicians to talk with one another: all communication had to pass through the meta-programmer.
> Simonyi’s 1977 dissertation, “Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method.” Simonyi proposed a new approach to “optimizing productivity,” in which one lead programmer, or “meta-programmer,” designed a product and defined all its terms, then handed off a blueprint to “technicians,” worker-bee programmers who would do the implementation. Simonyi aimed to escape Brooks’s Law by forbidding the technicians to talk with one another: all communication had to pass through the meta-programmer.
> -- Scott Rosenberg, "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta", https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/01/01/227178/anything-...