Famous Quotes

Famous Quotes on software development:

"You can't fill a five-pound bag with ten pounds of sugar, but you can visit the grocery store every week." -- C. Keith Ray

"WaterFall lets you hit where the target was, XP lets you hit where the target will be." -- Wyatt Sutherland

A conversation between Richard P. Gabriel and Brad Appleton heard at CHili-PLoP several years ago:

RPG: There are two kinds of development lifecycle, there is the incremental/iterative way, which tends to work; and then everything else that is not incremental or iterative, which tends not to work.

Brad: So basically you are saying there is incremental development, and then everything else is "excremental" development?

RPG: Sounds about right.

Predates XP, but still very relevant:

[[ soon to be deleted "Nine women take one month to have a baby." -- (Who was the first to say this?) ]]

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." -- in The MythicalManMonth by FredBrooks

I think Frederick Brooks Jr. is quoting:

"Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month." -- Wernher von Braun (1912-1977)

A mathematical version of this is called AmdahlsLaw.

"Measuring software productivity by LinesOfCode is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs." -- BillGates (and he should know!)

Marshall McLuhan: "We don't know who discovered water, but we can be certain it wasn't a fish."

You can't shine shit -- Unknown

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." - Thomas Edison

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