Fred Brooks Quotes

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

Personally, I tend to be more interested in security and performance-related issues than other things.

Data not only measures progress—it inspires it. Once you start measuring problems, people are more inclined to take action to fix them, because nobody wants to end up at the bottom of a list of rankings.

Prime Minister Modi keeps challenging the system to keep performing better and better. He sets aggressive targets, and the whole system has to act.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Programming is all about numbers.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the optimizer.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

My restlessness leaves my mind racing as I try to wind down at the end of mandatory recovery day. It keeps me tossing after poor performances. And if I played well, well... playing well makes me itch to play better; there is always room for improvement.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Too many companies waste time trying to eliminate their employees' weaknesses when, in fact, they should concentrate on developing their strengths.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is to hold its global complexity down - to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

The World War demonstrated the importance of Field Artillery. The majority of casualties were inflicted by the arm.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

Even more important than statistics is then having the staff that can take the data and ensure it's presented in a way that improves individuals and teams.

Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won where the way leads to the cross.