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

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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to 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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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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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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Successful software always gets changed.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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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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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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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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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.
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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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