Many spend their time berating practitioners for not applying their method. We all need to disseminate our ideas, but most of our time should be spent applying and improving our methods, not selling them. The best way to sell a mouse trap is to display some trapped mice.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.

There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them.

Whenever anyone says, 'theoretically', they really mean, 'not really'.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

Complexity is not a goal. I don't want to be remembered as an engineer of complex systems.