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Robert_N_Britcher

Lines of Code

“...programmers abhor the line of code. When managers speak of it, programmers quicken their step. Most of them know that the line of code is as central to the meaning of a program as the period is to the meaning of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 50.

Requirements Testing

“Requirements testing is a subtle way of treating a nonlinear, unpredictable system as if it were a discrete symbol like a number or a word. The potential and the actual become muddled. Requirements are natural language statements, peppered in places with arithmetic. These are discrete and usually quite vague representations of the system as it might become. But the truth is that two teams writing requirements for the same system would describe them differently, and neither would get it quite right, simply because 'right' cannot be known until the system is built. ... Requirements testing is a little like trying to reduce crime in England by running a test for each line in the Magna Carta. In practice, rhetoric replaces the scientific method. As with mathematical proofs, the quest for 'true or not false' soon turns into a party - a not very cordial party - marked by endless debate over whether this sentence or that sentence has been verified by this moment of behavior or that.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 157.

Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra

Lines of Code

“My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.”

Paul_Dirac

Beauty in Equations

“I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equations, and if one has a really sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.”
  • Source: Paul Dirac, "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature". Article republished from May 1963 issue of Scientific American, blogs.scientificamerican.com. June 25, 2010.

David_Epstein

Haiku

“Haiku, the three-line poem made by alternating lines of five, seven, and five syllables... in the seventeenth century, a student of Zen named Matsuo Bashō... made it into its own serious form, imbued with Zen principles. Not only were the words spare, but the ethos was as well... It prompted poets to pause and look mindfully at the world around them... This minuscule problem space is known around the world for its ability to turn anyone, from kindergartener to adult, into a probing wordsmith in an instant. Look around you; try it. The form's scarcity will immediately ignite an exploration of new linguistic possibilities in your mind.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 68. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Arthur_L_Herman

Assembly Line Flexibility

“Ford had developed his assembly line to make a single product. Knudsen would show him how it could be used to make any product, anywhere.”
  • Source: Arthur L. Herman in the book “Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II”. Written by Arthur Herman. Published in 2012 by Random House, New York, NY. ISBN: 9780679604631 (ebook). Page 21.

David_E_Nye

Programmers Perfectionists

“A single error in a program thousands of lines long prevented it from running correctly, and computer programmers became known as a fanatically exact group of perfectionists, working in an arcane specialty. Sociologists studying the ‘man-machine' interface found that a programmer's personality often changed after prolonged exposure to the computer, becoming severely logical and machine-like.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 10, page 164.

Ipek_Ozkaya

Hello World Development

“We teach students hello world development, while we should be teaching them how to read millions of lines of code, triage and fix bugs that they have not contributed to and understand the structure and behavior of the software rather than the single class or story card they are responsible for.”
  • Source: Ipek Ozkaya, “Application of Large Language Models to Software Engineering Tasks: Opportunities, Risks, and Implications,” in IEEE Software, volume 40, number 3, pages 4-8, May-June 2023, DOI: 10.1109/MS.2023.3248401.

Richard_Pascale

Efficiency and Variation

“Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by 'getting all the ducks in line'. To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff results - as long as the music lasts. But in the face of nontraditional competitors or major environmental discontinuities, all that streamlining and reengineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization by those closest to the disruptive change, and curtails a bottom-up emergent response to cope more effectively... Nothing fails like success. Over-adaptive organizations become inflexible. Disruptive change leaves them as helpless as a beached whale.”
  • Source: Richard T. Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2010). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.190, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press

Alfred_Wegener

Continental Drift

“The first concept of continental drift first came to me as far back as 1910, when considering the map of the world, under the direct impression produced by the congruence of the coast lines on either side of the Atlantic. At first I did not pay attention to the ideas because I regarded it as improbable. In the fall of 1911, I came quite accidentally upon a synoptic report in which I learned for the first time of palaeontological evidence for a former land bridge between Brazil and Africa. As a result I undertook a cursory examination of relevant research in the fields of geology and palaeontology, and this provided immediately such weighty corroboration that a conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind.”
  • Source: Alfred L. Wegener, In The Origins of Continents and Oceans (4th ed. 1929), trans. John Biram (1966), 1.

Gerald_Weinberg

Management Deskilling

“Even though the nth-level manager may have originally been a programmer, which is rare enough, he has almost certainly lost any programming ability by the time he reaches these heights. Given the rapid change of programming techniques and hardware, the higher-level manager becomes obsolete even if he retains the skills he originally had and keeps them sharply honed, for those languages and those machines are no longer in use. In a small survey of working programmers, only 15 percent of the first-line managers were thought to be as skillful as the programmers themselves, and none of the higher-level managers.”
  • Source: Chapter 6. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.