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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

Fred Brooks

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Fred Brooks
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: April 19
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Mathematician
Software Engineer
University Teacher
Durham
North Carolina
Frederick Phillips Brooks
Jr.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Frederick Phillips Fred Brooks
Jr
Frederick P. Brooks
Frederick Phillips
Learning
Difficult
Requirement
Part
Adjusting
Think
Programmers
Thinking
Requirements
Programming
Perfection
Program

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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.
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The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built.
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The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts they'll be obvious.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
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There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
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