Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr. Quotes

Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

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.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

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.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. [] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: [] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.

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.

Frederick Phillips Brooks, Jr.
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