Fernando J. "corby" Corbató Quotes
July 1, 1926
More Fernando J. "corby" Corbató Quotes
The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— "A Managerial View of the Multics System Development" (1978)
It is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— p. 80 (On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991))
Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— "PL/I as a Tool for System Programming", Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76
Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— "PL/I as a Tool for System Programming", Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76. This has been paraphrased variously by others as Corbató's Law:Productivity and reliability depend on the length of a program’s text, independent of language level used.Albert Endres, H. Dieter Rombach, A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories (2003), ISBN 0321154207, p. 72
Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— p. 75 (On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991))
The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing down. The field is not mature yet and already it accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross National Product.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— p. 75 (On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991))
To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were more than a second.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— p. 77 (On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991))
Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to systems.
Fernando J. "corby" Corbató— p. 78 (On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991))
