today I note of the passing of Fred Brooks
ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what the earth giveth, the earth taketh away,
according to en.wikipedia.org entry on Fred Brooks
Brooks died on November 17, 2022, at the age of 91.[24][25]
https://mastodon.lawprofs.org/@SteveBellovin/109362211705242308
Steve Bellovin
@SteveBellovin@mastodon.lawprofs.org
Sad news from UNC Chapel Hill Computer Science — Fred P. Brooks, the founder and long-time chair of the department (and a major influence on my professional outlook) passed away a few hours ago.
Nov 17, 2022, 17:28 ·
For those of you (us) who took computer science, you would've read the book, The Mythical-Man Month: essays on software engineering. He is one of my favorite writer (author). He writing is very read able (access able). In my opinion, ...
We shall keep him in our memory and stories, indeed.
(Did not even know he was still around, completely off my RADAR)
If you want to see a picture of him, you can visit https://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/
The page is still up, maybe they will keep it there for awhile.
Another passing of computer science giant.
Brooks’ law
“Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.”
Brooks’ law comes from Fred Brooks’ 1975 book The Mythical Man Month. It deals with the assumption that team members and months needed are interchangeable.
This is not the case — particularly in software development (or any product development, for that matter). Why? Because of the time it takes to bring and keep people up to [speed] with the project.
Brook’s Law
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Named after Fred Brooks, aka, Mr. Mythical Man Month.
The corollary to this principle is the following…
The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/11/18/1352233/fred-brooks-has-died
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/11/102658255-05-01-acc.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
Fred Brooks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Frederick Brooks" redirects here. For other people, see Frederick Brooks (disambiguation).
Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks.jpg
2007 photo
Born Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr.
April 19, 1931
Durham, North Carolina, US
Died November 17, 2022 (aged 91)
Known for OS/360
The Mythical Man-Month[1]
Spouse Nancy Greenwood Brooks
Children Kenneth, Roger, Barbara
Doctoral advisor Howard Aiken[3]
Doctoral students Andrew S. Glassner
Website www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. (April 19, 1931 – November 17, 2022) was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about the process in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month
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── the worst decision is documented in The Mythical Man Month
── that was the decision to take the architecture away from the architecture group and give it to the operating system manager.
── Marty Belsky the architecture manager said, “If you leave it with me, it’ll be the same amount late, it will cost the same, but it’ll be right” and he was right and I was wrong
── that was a multimillion dollar mistake.
Booch: So in that process, sort of a threefold question: what was the best decision you made? What is the worst decision you made? And I’ll come back to the third one.
Brooks: Well the worst decision is documented in The Mythical Man Month and that was the decision to take the architecture away from the architecture group and give it to the operating system manager. As I document there he said, “It’ll be so much late and it’ll cost so much” and Marty Belsky the architecture manager said, “If you leave it with me, it’ll be the same amount late, it will cost the same, but it’ll be right” and he was right and I was wrong and that was a multimillion dollar mistake.
Booch: Right.
Brooks: The best decision in the whole program was certainly the eight-bit byte. The best decision in the operating system, well, the assembly language, surprisingly enough, posed a lot of technical problems because there were two entirely different schools of thought had grown up in the scientific and the commercial sides. On the commercial side, the assembly language served as a platform on which high priests in any different corporation wrote macros and the troops programmed in the macro language and so Eastman Kodak was a proponent of this and had done a really good job of that and various others. In the scientific community, the scientists would write their own macros and they programmed in assembly language, macro enhanced. And so the question of how to resolve all this led me into technical thickets, the thickest technical thickets I got into in the operating system. The other set of technical decisions I made had to do with PL/I and the whole question of do we use equal for assignment following the Fortran tradition or do we use a colon-equal [:=] kind of thing? But the more serious question is do we do independent evaluation of expressions so that you can factor out common sub-expressions?
source:
Oral History of Fred Brooks
Interviewed by: Grady Booch
Edited by: Dag Spicer
Recorded: September 16, 2007
Cambridge, United Kingdom
CHM Reference number: X4146.2008
© 2007 Computer History Museum
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