Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.

Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.