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Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. […] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

— Fred Brooks No Silver Bullet (1986)

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More quotes by Fred Brooks

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975)

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three."

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975)

Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Fred Brooks (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.