Fred Brooks quote: “The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure.…”

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

https://lwn.net/Articles/193245/

“…git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to Git mailing list, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-06-27, 2006-08-28 http://lwn.net/Articles/193245/,
2000s, 2006

“In perception itself, two distinct processes can be discerned. One is the gathering of the primary, sensory data or simple sensing of such things as light, moisture or pressure, and the other is the structuring of such data into information.”

Edward Ihnatowicz (1926–1988) Cybernetic sculptor

Source: The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception, 1977, p. 133

“The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i. e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Gene Amdahl, Gerrit Blaauw, and Fred Brooks (1964) " Architecture of the IBM System http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.7974&rep=rep1&type=pdf." in: IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol 8 (2) p. 87-101

“The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i. e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

Gene Amdahl, Gerrit Blaauw, and Fred Brooks (1964) "Architecture of the IBM System." in: IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol 8 (2) p. 87-101.

“… the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one [… ] as one learns, he changes the design [… ]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)

“Economic principles underlie the overall structure of the software lifecycle, and its primary refinements of prototyping, incremental development, and advancemanship. The primary economic driver of the life-cycle structure is the significantly increasing cost of making a software change or fixing a software problem, as a function of the phase in which the change or fix is made.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: Software engineering economics. (1984), p. 4

“Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Source: The Heart of Change, (2002), p. x: Preface
Context: Leading Change describes the eight steps people follow to produce new ways of operating. In The Heart of Change, we dig into the core problem people face in all of these steps, and how to successfully deal with that problem. Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. All those elements, and others, are important. But the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings.

“We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

. . The value of labor under socialism will be determined by its value to the state, to the whole community. Labor means creating value, not haggling over things.
“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We a Workers’ Party?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932)
1930s

“Never has it been more controlled ever. Take the addition, the changes, the copyrights turn, take the changes to copyrights scope, put it against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture. Never.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002
Context: Now, here's the thing you've got to remember. You've got to see this. This is the point. (And Jack Valenti misses this.) Here's the point: Never has it been more controlled ever. Take the addition, the changes, the copyrights turn, take the changes to copyrights scope, put it against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture. Never.

“The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.”

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