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Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

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
Must
Arbitrary
Capricious
Engineers
Comforts
Programming
Argued
Software
Explanations
Explanation
Repeatedly
Comfort
Engineer
Faith
Einstein
Nature
Amusing
Simplified

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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers
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Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.
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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties for the media are not ours in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.
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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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The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture
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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.
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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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