Osvaldo Santana Neto

“The problem is that programmers in O-O have been experimenting in incestuous applications and aiming low in abstraction, instead of high. For example, they have been building classes such as linked-list or set instead of classes such as user-interface or radiation beam or finite-element model. Unfortunately the self-same strong type-checking in C++ that helps programmers to avoid errors also makes it hard to build big things out of little ones.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“All repairs tend to destroy the structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of the system. Less and less effort is spent on fixing original design flaws; more and more is spent on fixing flaws introduced by earlier fixes. As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing ceases to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Beyond craftsmanship lies invention, and it is here that lean, spare, fast programs are born. Almost always these are the result of strategic breakthrough rather than tactical cleverness. Sometimes the strategic breakthrough will be a new algorithm, such as the Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transform or the substitution of an n log n sort for an n2 set of comparisons. Much more often, strategic breakthrough will come from redoing the representation of the data or tables. This is where the heart of a program lies.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Organizations must be designed around the people available; not people fitted into pure-theory organizations”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering