Gerald M. Weinberg Quotes

Since nobody's perfect, we need resistance to test our ideas.

Your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.

In many programming situations, the primary working unit is a team, not an individual.

A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he is going to be trying to prove that the program is correct — even if this means the oversight of errors which are monstrous to another eye. All programmers are familiar with the symptoms of this dissonance resolution — -in others, of course.

each program has an appropriate level of care and sophistication dependent on the uses to which it will be put. Working above that level is, in a way, even less professional than working below it. If we are to know whether an individual programmer is doing a good job, we shall have to know whether or not he is working on the proper level for his problem.

there will always remain the fact that, in most cases, we do not know what we want to do until we have taken a flying leap at programming it.

Another essential personality factor in programming is at least a small dose of humility. Without humility, a programmer is foredoomed to the classic pattern of Greek drama: success leading to overconfidence (hubris) leading to blind self-destruction. Sophocles himself could not frame a better plot (to reveal the inadequacy of our powers) than that of the programmer learning a few simple techniques, feeling that he is an expert, and then being crushed by the irresistible power of the computer (the Deus ex Machina).

Programmers do not ordinarily work in isolation. Although an individual programmer may find herself assigned the task of writing a program, even then she has other programmers to whom she may turn for help — and who, at the same time, may be turning to her.

Victor Hugo once said that nothing in this world was so powerful as an idea whose time has come. In our time, the idea is technology, especially information processing technology. The programmer partakes of this technology power

The shortsighted or insecure team leader may feel that the best way to please management is to promise them whatever they ask. But, ultimately, what the management wants is kept promises, and these can only be obtained if the team leader can win team acceptance of the promises as their goals. What the team leader must learn is that Managers — no matter how hard they press for promises — really want results. Results will be far more easily obtained if they are obtained in the pursuit of goals set with full team participation.

People have lost sight of the original intention of COBOL’s designers. To quote one of them, Jean Sammet: The users for whom COBOL was designed were actually two subclasses of those people concerned with business data processing problems. One is the relatively inexperienced programmer for whom the naturalness of COBOL would be an asset, while the other type of user would be essentially anybody who had not written the program initially. In other words, the readability of COBOL programs would provide documentation to all who might wish to examine the programs, including the supervisory or management personnel. Little attempt was made to cater to professional programmers…

If a program doesn’t work, measures of efficiency, of adaptability, or of cost of production have no meaning.

The biggest new factor for determining how we judge the quality of code is the economic factor. A program that sells, and makes profits, is obviously better than one that doesn’t.

the more adapted an organism was to present conditions, the less adaptable it tended to be to unknown future conditions.

human interactions are never narrow, never straight, and hardly ever in the directions shown an organization charts. Many serious mistakes have been made in imagining that formal structure was the only structure in an organization.