You want your software development to be more like farming. Farmers are methodical in knowing the lay of the land, studying its current chemical makeup, planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting their crops. Software that is reliable, extensible, and maintainable is developed just as methodically.

— Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty, Managing the Unmanageable

CASE tools were useful, but most of them became shelfware simply because they couldn’t live up to the exaggerated claims that were made for them.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

People with a fixed mindset fear failure as they believe it makes their innate limitations visible to others, whereas those with a growth mindset are less risk averse by seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and develop new skills.

— Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly, Lean Enterprise

For the physicist or engineer, two systems that obey the same equations have a kind of identity-or at least an analogy. And that, after all, is all our word analog means. A digital watch is nothing like the sun; an analog watch is the memory of a shadow’s circuit around a dial.

— Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play

In 1965 in a paper beautifully titled “Path, Trees and Flowers,” Edmonds developed a bit more complicated method for finding the augmenting paths in general friendship diagrams. … Edmonds goes into a long digression on the nature of an efficient algorithm. While he realizes that no formal definition can completely capture the intuitive idea of efficiency, he suggests a notion of efficiency by having a procedure that uses computation time that is “algebraic” in the size of the problem, for example, 100^4 or 100^2 or 100^12. Later this class of problems would become known as P (for “polynomial,” which replaced Edmond’s “algebraic”) and come to represent problems we can solve efficiently. That’s the P side of the P versus NP question.

— Lance Fortnow, The Golden Ticket