Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.

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.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they have almost never thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified.

...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.