Quote

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.

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
Battle
Ending
System
Primaries
Change
Primary
Modules
Firsts
Slow
Reorganize
First
Data
Programmer
Never
Response
Programmers
Structure
Structures
Weapons
Weapon

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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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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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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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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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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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 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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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Successful software always gets changed.
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