A Quote by Fred Brooks

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.

Fred Brooks

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Abstract Accidental Away Complexity Descriptions Entity Essence Essential Hence Often Property Software

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Fred Brooks
American - Scientist
Born: April 19, 1931

Second law: The complexity barrier. Software complexity (and therefore that of bugs) grows to the limits of our ability to manage that complexity.

Boris Beizer

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

Bjarne Stroustrup

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.

Fred Brooks

Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.

Bill Gates

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

Brian Behlendorf

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

Eric S. Raymond

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

Niklaus Wirth

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

Miguel de Icaza

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

Richard Stallman

The default movement on a software project should be in the direction of taking elements of the software away to make it simpler rather than adding elements to make it more complex.

Steve McConnell

Software patents are dangerous to software developers because they impose monopolies on software ideas.

Richard Stallman

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

Wietse Venema

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

David Gelernter

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Linus Torvalds

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Linus Torvalds

We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.

George M. Whitesides

A Quote by Fred Brooks

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