Quotes About Progress

If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.

1. "First make it work." You are out of business if it doesn't work. 2. "Then make it right." Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. "Then make it fast." Refactor the code for "needed" performance.

We programmers simply do not know how long things will take. This isn't because we are incompetent or lazy; it's because there is simply no way to know how complicated a task is going to be until that task is engaged and finished. But, as we'll see, all is not lost.

On the other hand, a system being developed by five different teams, each of which includes seven developers, cannot make progress unless the system is divided into well-defined components with reliably stable interfaces. If no other factors are considered, the architecture of that system will likely evolve into five components—one for each team.

If only we could pull this off one more time. If only we could just say we were done with implementation. But we can't, because the thing about implementation is that is actually has to be done. Analysis and design are not binary deliverables. They do not have unambiguous completion criteria. There's no real way to know that you are done with them. So we might as well be done on time.

refactored)    /**

Analysis and design are not binary deliverables. They do not have unambiguous completion criteria. There's no real way to know that you are done with them.

As you mature in your profession, your error rate should rapidly decrease towards the asymptote of zero.

MacBook is at least 1022 more powerful than those early computers that I started using half a century ago

I used to think 2000 lines was a big program. After all, it was a full box of cards that weighed 10 pounds. Now, however, a program isn't really big until it exceeds 100,000 lines.

We've all looked at the mess we've just made and then have chosen to leave it for another day. We've all felt the relief of seeing our messy program work and deciding that a working mess is better than nothing. We've all said we'd go back and clean it up later. Of course, in those days we didn't know LeBlanc's law: Later equals never.

highway through the middle of a small town that anticipates growth? Who would want such a road through their town? It is a myth that we can get systems "right the first time." Instead, we should implement only today's stories, then refactor and expand the system to implement new stories tomorrow.

Some folks think that Agile is about going fast. It's not. It's never been about going fast. Agile is about knowing, as early as possible, just how screwed we are.

Perhaps you thought that "getting it working" was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made.

The real point is this: We don't know where to go because we don't know what we are. Do you want to go back to living in a sewer-pipe? And eating other people's garbage? Because that's what rats do. But the fact is, we aren't rats anymore. We are something Dr. Schultz has made. Something new.

It had taken about two centuries for the feudal system of economy to show its superiority over the slave system, Stalin said, and about a hundred years or less for the bourgeois system to prove its superiority over feudal economy. Because technological progress had now greatly accelerated the pace of development and change, however, the socialist system of economy could advance with "giant strides" and out-perform capitalism in a much shorter period.

Where to Begin?" Printed in Stuttgart in March 1902, under the title What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement,

eighteen-forties and fifties

For that, the proletariat must be victorious "at least in several other countries."[587] Only in the further progress of world revolution lay final security—and in that sense final victory—for the Soviet Revolution.

The First Decade

You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

Societies progress by the free assertion of differing proposals, followed by criticism, followed by the genuine possibility of change in the light of criticism....The whole approach of an authoritarian society is anti-rational. A rational and scientific approach requires societies to be open and pluralistic."—Karl Popper

teleological engineering.

The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.