21 quotes
As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world.
If the software doesn't have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.
Science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things.
If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Weinberg attributed with the quote in: Murali Chemuturi (2010)
The power of the Ten Commandments is magnified if you remember the Helpful Model: No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful.
A controller that cannot control itself is worse than no controller at all: If you cannot manage yourself, you have no business managing others.
Helping myself is even harder than helping others.
The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.
Citation in: Lowell Jay Arthur (1992)
The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.
When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.
M. B. Douthwaite (2002)
A system is never finished being developed until it ceases to be used.
to Gerald M. Weinberg in: Hannes P. Lubich (1995)
Things are the way they are because they got that way
I believe, however, that humans are the only animals that we know who invents tools for working together - and they have done that as long as we have considered them human.
Gerald M. Weinberg (1992)
The principle is simple and powerful enough to be Marvin's Fourth Great Secret: If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else.
The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.
Asking for efficiency and adaptability in the same program is like asking for a beautiful and modest wife. Although beauty and modesty have been known to occur in the same woman, we'll probably have to settle for one or the other. At least that's better than neither.
Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Murali Chemuturi (2010)
Newton was a genius, but not because of the superior computational power of his brain. Newton's genius was, on the contrary, his ability to simplify, idealize, and streamline the world so that it became, in some measure, tractable to the brains of perfectly ordinary men.
Let’s hope that no system of theory of systems will ever eliminate the other systems – that no approach will be promoted to a dogma, and no group of scientists will become the high priests. Shouldn’t we rather let a hundred flowers bloom...?
Weinberg (1976)
Quality is value to some person