Heavy quotes

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Robert_N_Britcher

Important Development Things

“The single, most important thing is that the individual programmer needs to be given total responsibility and control of the programming, including its function... eliminate project design and review as an exhaustive and rigorous process. Most of the design and review should occur as the program is written. ... Monitor progress on the project by talking to the individual programmers as [code] is being written. ... You must trust developers on the project to create a good product. ... Sometimes there are failures. ... The important thing is to fail quickly so you have time to find another approach. ... Developers must also feel free to say what they think to their supervisor. ... Managers should be the best programmers; ...There should be no overtime pay. ... Use profit-sharing and bonuses to get awesome products. ... Developers should each get their own office. ... Eliminate the dress code. Avoid meetings at all costs. ... Writing software is a lot like writing a book. Almost anyone can write garbage; very few can write a best-seller.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 155-156.

Alistair_Cockburn

Striking Project Findings

"What I find striking about these projects is that they show:
Almost any methodology can be made to work on some project.
Any methodology can manage to fail on some project.
Heavy processes can be successful.
Light processes are more often successful, and more importantly, the people on those projects credit the success to the lightness of the methodology."

Peter_Drucker

Layoffs

“...what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.”
  • Source: A cantankerous interview with Peter Drucker, Wired (August 1996).

Sabine_Hossenfelder

Closer Reality

“The foundations of physics give us a closer look at reality, but the closer we look at reality, the more slippery it becomes. Our heavy use of mathematics is a major reason. The more the fundamental descriptions of nature have become divorced from our everyday experience, the more we must rely on mathematical rigor. This reliance has consequences. Using math to describe reality means that the same observations can be equivalently explained in many different ways. That’s just because there are many sets of mathematical axioms that will give the exact same predictions for all available data. Thus, if you want to assign 'reality' to one of your explanations, you won’t know which.”
  • Source: Hossenfelder, Sabine. Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (p. 74). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Herbert_Simon

Data for Planning

“The quality of design is likely to depend heavily on the quality of the data available. The task is not to design without data but to incorporate assessments of the quality of the data, or its lack of quality, in the design process itself.”

Stephen_Wolfram

Foundational Math Problem

“Here's the foundational problem. The mathematics you need is completely unknown. We're trying to build it, but here's how it works. If you study calculus, you'll study univariant calculus, calculus of one variable. You'll study multivariant calculus, calculus where there's variables x, y, z, and so on. What we need is calculus where there are fractional number of variables, and nobody has ever figured that out. Nobody has even tried to study that. When you look at the kind of geometry that emerges from these hypergraphs and things you end up needing to know about things like calculus in 3.1 dimensions. That's simply a mathematical structure that hasn't been built. We're in the process of building it, but it is a fairly heavy lift. That's a deep, foundational piece of mathematics that has to be built...”
  • Source: Spoken by Stephen Wolfram in a video interview with Brian Keating recorded in the YouTube video ‘What is Time? Stephen Wolfram’s Groundbreaking New Theory’ published on channel ‘Dr. Brian Keating’ on 2024-12-02. Video offset 1:32:08. Online at https://youtu.be/c-RO3vM10Ok?si=i-XspeEtzqA3jPl9 retrieved 2024.