Fred Brooks has died

Here's a nice memorial article. Here's another. And here's his Wikipedia page, if you really somehow have no idea who Fred Brooks was.

I never met him, but I surely benefitted from him. I did my first serious programming on IBM mainframes, back in 1981, long after he had left IBM and moved to Chapel Hill.

And both The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet were seminal readings for me when I was just starting out.

I dragged my copy of Man-Month around with me for several decades, until it basically disintegrated from being read so many times.

And Silver Bullet was packed with practical insights, talking about critically important practices such as prototyping and incremental development long before the days of the Agile Manifesto.

He's nowhere near as well-known as he should be, which is a shame, because he certainly was a very important presence in the software engineering field.