Fred Brooks Quotes

Software is now so complex - requiring so many gazillions of tiny files all over your computer - that most consumers don't want to bother to know what's really going on.

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 have spent seventy years finding out that I am not God.

We aren't made to be worshipped as humans. I think that is why we see so many great artists crumble, because as humans, we are made to serve each other.

Anybody can be rattled. Tom Brady is a great quarterback, but at the end of the day, he is just a quarterback. It's not like he is God.

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

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Software is inherently complicated. If you say to somebody I want an airline reservation system, to really say what you want in terms of overbooking and fares, and different airlines communicating with each or schedule changes, it's immensely complex. And so you can't write a program that's any simpler than that full specification.

But let us not put our sights too high. We do not have to be saviours of the world! We are simply human beings, enfolded in weakness and in hope, called together to change our world one heart at a time. (163)

The race by vigour, not by vaunts, is won.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.

It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.

While I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.

most economists, like doctors, are reluctant to make predictions, and those who make them are seldom accurate. The economy, like the human body, is a highly complex system whose workings are not thoroughly understood.

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.

I'm not interested in perfection. The universe is perfect, and there are some works of art that we see as perfect, but human beings aren't perfect.

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.

My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.

He was royalty. So what? Everyone had a flaw.

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.

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.