Gerald Weinberg Quotes

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.

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

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...?

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

We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM's ServiceBureau Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or assumed it as totally natural. I do remember Herb Jacobs (primarily, though we all participated) developing a large simulation for Motorola, where the technique used was, as far as I can tell, indistinguishable from XP.

When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.

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.