Fred Brooks Quotes

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

All software sucks.

Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.

Software is like gardening - one day I'll go behind the shed and clean up. But if nobody ever goes there, does it matter a lot?

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

Successful software always gets changed.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works.

It's easy to make mistakes that only come out much later, after you've already implemented a lot of code. You'll realize Oh I should have used a different type of data structure. Start over from scratch.

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.