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Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues, including "Flexible and Distributed Software Processes: Old Petunias in New Bowls," from the October 2006 issue, "Music Score Alignment and Computer Accompaniment," and "Changing the Paradigm of Software Engineering," both from the August 2006 issue.

Presents several letters to the editor in response to the article "The Locality Principle," published in the July 2005 issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM." Evolution of humans in making design decisions when building computing systems; View that human brain's structure makes locality a natural feature of human behavior; Opinion on programmer productivity.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in the previous issues of the journal Communications of the ACM. "A Look at the Economics of Open Source," which focused on free software; "Programming Languages and Gender," which discussed about the scarcity of information technology workers; "On Pseudo Object-Oriented Programming Considered Harmful," which discussed design and coding.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Repeatability in Computer Systems Research," which appeared in the March 2016 issue.

A response by Jeff Kramer to a letter to the editor about his article "Is Abstraction the Key to Computing?" which appeared in the April 2007 issue is presented.

Letters to the editor are presented in response to the article "Large-Scale Complex IT Systems” by Ian Sommerville and colleagues in the July 2012 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Objects Never, Well, Hardly Ever!" by Mordechai Ben-Ari in the September 2010 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "You're Doing It Wrong," by Poul-Henning Kamp which appeared in the July 2010 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Software Design and the Monkey's Brain," by Robert L. Glass in his "Practical Programmer" column in the June 2008 issue.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues including "The 'Art' of Being Donald Knuth," by Edward Feigenbaum in the July 2008 issue, "In Search of Dependable Design," by Leah Hoffman in the July 2008 issue, and "Information Accountability," by Daniel J. Weitzner in the June 2008 issue.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Why the Internet Is Bad for Democracy" by Eli M. Noam in the October 2005 issue.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to the article "Designing Sticky Knowledge Networks," by Ashley A. Bush and Amrit Tiwana, published in the May 2005 issue of the journal "Communications of the ACM."

Presents a letter to the editor commenting on teaching dataless objects.

The article focuses on the evolution of software design principles. Machine code had been replaced by ad hoc high-level language programming, which in turn succumbed to structured programming. Structure programming, in turn led to object-oriented programming, which moved on to client-server programming and distributed objects, and even evolving toward Web services. While there is an overlap in the design principles of each of the trends, each of them also delivers its own new design elements. Software is an intellectual creation, which makes it less amenable to the setting of standards and principles. It is also entirely possible that software design principles may vary significantly depending on the application for which the software is intended. It is therefore difficult to be confident that software design is moving toward a stable, solid basis. Software seems to be subject to fewer such rules and is therefore perhaps more like mathematics. Hence, relatively few fundamental design super principles would be available despite discovery of new principles.

Presents several letters to the editor about computer network protocols, published in the March 2004 issue of the periodical "Communications of the ACM." Discussion on an article by Coskun Bayrak and Chad Davis, published in a previous issue, on distributed computer network protocols; Discussion on the Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol and its relation with Linux users.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "In the Beginning Was the Word" by Christine Rosen in the Autumn 2009 issue.