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.

Mediocre design provably wastes the world's resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.

Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.