 fortune index all fortunes
| | #2581 | | 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. Consider Unix,
APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them
with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
| | | #2582 | | ...computer hardware progress is so fast. No other technology since
civilization began has seen six orders of magnitude in performance-price
gain in 30 years.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
| | | #2583 | | Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human
construct because no two parts are alike. If they are, we make the two
similar parts into a subroutine -- open or closed. In this respect, software
systems differ profoundly from computers, buildings, or automobiles, where
repeated elements abound.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
| | | #2584 | | Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people build:
They hyave very large numbers of states. This makes conceiving, describing,
and testing them hard. Software systems have orders-of-magnitude more states
than computers do.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
| | | #2585 | | The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one.
Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity
often abstract away its essence.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
| | | #2586 | | Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because
God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software
engineer.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
| | | #2587 | | Except for 75% of the women, everyone in the whole world wants to have sex.
- Ellyn Mustard
| | | #2588 | | The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems
and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting
language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best
dangerous.
- Bjarne Stroustrup in "The C++ Programming Language"
| | | #2589 | | The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
- Brian Kernighan
| | | #2590 | | Perfection is acheived only on the point of collapse.
- C. N. Parkinson
| | | | ... ... |
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