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Quote by Fred Brooks

“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.”

Quote by Fred Brooks

Author

Fred Brooks is an American software engineer born in April 1931. He has had a profound impact on the field of software engineering, particularly through his work on the classic book 'The Mythical Man-Month'. During his tenure at IBM, Brooks led the development of the IBM System/360 operating system, a project that was one of the most successful in IBM's history. His contributions to software engineering principles, such as the 'No Silver Bullet' theory, have provided deep insights into the nature and complexity of software development. more

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“I can't be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It's at that level.”

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“In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.”

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“If you find that you're spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you find that you're spending almost all your time on practice, start turning some attention to theoretical things; it will improve your practice.”

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“Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science.”

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Book:Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 4,The: Generating All Trees--History of Combinatorial Generation

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“For his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the "art of computer programming" through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.”

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“If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.”

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“no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.”

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