Quote

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.

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
Beyond
Mapping
Brain
Renewing
Alone
Intricate
Rich
Protecting
Secret
Imitation
Powerful
Grown
Self
Diversity
Built

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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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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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Predictability and great design are not friends.
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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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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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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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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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...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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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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A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.
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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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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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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 bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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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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Design work doesn't just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.
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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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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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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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