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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.

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
Pride
Implementation
Color
Difficulties
Media
Judgement
Ideas
Colors
Way
Difficulty
Tend
Blame
Physical

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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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Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.
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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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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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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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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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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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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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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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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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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A scientist builds in order to learn an engineer learns in order to build.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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Plan to throw one (implementation) away you will, anyhow.
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Successful software always gets changed.
Fred Brooks