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

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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
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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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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.
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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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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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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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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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