David Parnas received a number of awards and honors: In modular design, his double dictum[citation needed] of high cohesion within modules and loose coupling between modules is fundamental to modular design in software.

[3] Dr Parnas took a public stand against the US Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as "Star Wars") in the mid 1980s, arguing that it would be impossible to write an application of sufficient quality that it could be trusted to prevent a nuclear attack.

[4] He has also been in the forefront of those urging the professionalization of "software engineering" (a term that he characterizes as "an unconsummated marriage"[5]).

Parnas has joined the group of scientists which openly criticize the number-of-publications-based approach towards ranking academic production.

On his November 2007 paper Stop the Numbers Game,[6] he elaborates on several reasons on why the current number-based academic evaluation system used in many fields by universities all over the world (be it either oriented to the amount of publications or the amount of quotations each of those get) is flawed and, instead of contributing to scientific progress, it leads to knowledge stagnation.