Gerald Weinberg Quotes

We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals.

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...?

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.

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 power of the Ten Commandments is magnified if you remember the Helpful Model: No matter how it looks, everyone is trying to be helpful.

Quality is value to some person

The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.

Science is the study of those things that can be reduced to the study of other things.

The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language."

The Third Law of Consulting: Never forget they're paying you by the hour, not by the solution.

Helping myself is even harder than helping others.

A controller that cannot control itself is worse than no controller at all: If you cannot manage yourself, you have no business managing others.

As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world.

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

A system is never finished being developed until it ceases to be used.