Software Quotes

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.”
― Larry Niven

“It is not enough for code to work.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
― Joseph Weizenbaum

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
― Donald Ervin Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms

“Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“As data and science become more accessible and more the production of software and AI, human creativity is becoming a more valuable commodity.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“More importantly, our software worked. I don't just mean that it didn't bump, or that it performed according to the written specifications, or that it was efficient in producing reports. It really worked”
― Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

“The Joel Test

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?
4. Do you have a bug database?
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7. Do you have a spec?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10. Do you have testers?
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“Softwares are becoming the new cargo ships and freight trucks. Digital files are becoming the new core commodities. The formers won't eliminate the latters, but a restructuring is happening.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Joscha: For me a very interesting discovery in the last year was the word spirit—because I realized that what “spirit” actually means: It’s an operating system for an autonomous robot. And when the word was invented, people needed this word, but they didn’t have robots that built themselves yet; the only autonomous robots that were known were people, animals, plants, ecosystems, cities and so on. And they all had spirits. And it makes sense to say that a plant is an operating system, right? If you pinch the plant in one area, then it’s going to have repercussions throughout the plant. Everything in the plant is in some sense connected into some global aesthetics, like in other organisms. An organism is not a collection of cells; it’s a function that tells cells how to behave. And this function is not implemented as some kind of supernatural thing, like some morphogenetic field, it is an emergent result of the interactions of each cell with each other cell.

Lex: Oh my god, so what you’re saying is the organism is a function that tells the cells what to do? And the function emerges from the interaction of the cells.

Joscha: Yes. So it’s basically a description of what the plant is doing in terms of macro-states. And the macro-states, the physical implementation are too many of them to describe them, so the software that we use to describe what a plant is doing—this spirit of the plant—is the software, the operating system of the plant, right? This is a way in which we, the observers, make sense of the plant. The same is true for people, so people have spirits, which is their operating system in a way, right, and there’s aspects of that operating system that relate to how your body functions, and others how you socially interact, how you interact with yourself and so on. And we make models of that spirit and we think it’s a loaded term because it’s from a pre-scientific age, but it took the scientific age a long time to rediscover a term that is pretty much the same thing and I suspect that the differences that we still see between the old word and the new word are translation errors that over the centuries.”
― Joscha Bach

“Regular expressions are widely used for string matching. Although regular-expression systems are derived from a perfectly good mathematical formalism, the particular choices made by implementers to expand the formalism into useful software systems are often disastrous: the quotation conventions adopted are highly irregular; the egregious misuse of parentheses, both for grouping and for backward reference, is a miracle to behold. In addition, attempts to increase the expressive power and address shortcomings of earlier designs have led to a proliferation of incompatible derivative languages.”
― Chris Hanson, Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner

“Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. 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. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Mindset is everything: the software operates the hardware.”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“In 2005 software actually had designs. Now everything is flat, colorless, without icons, without borders, gradients, just horrible. Mobile ruined everything, everything is just practical now.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“So the syntax of the regular-expression language is awful; there are various incompatible forms of the language; and the quotation conventions are baroquen [sic]. While regular expression languages are domain-specific languages, they are bad ones. Part of the value of examining regular expressions is to experience how bad things can be.”
― Chris Hanson, Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner

“In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix.”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“The confidence you get from knowing about every crash, anywhere in the world, is crucial to delivering a high-quality product that needs to be used in the wild. In the consumer software business, you can't rely on your customers to tell you about crashes—many of them may not be technical enough, and most of them won't bother to take time off of their own important work to give you a useful crash report unless you make it completely automatic.”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“Selenium Training in Chennai | Selenium Course in Chennai
Searching for Best Selenium Training in Chennai with Placement?.Best Selenium Course in Chennai. Contact us for Best Selenium Classes in Chennai.”
― Bita

“Southwest Airlines ruined Christmas 2022 for a million people.”
― Steven Magee

“If Southwest Airlines computers are not being fixed, what else is not being fixed?”
― Steven Magee

“Southwest Airlines canceled ten thousand flights during Christmas 2022!”
― Steven Magee

“Over the span of a year or two, teams that were moving very fast at the beginning of a project can find themselves moving at a snail’s pace. Every change they make to the code breaks two or three other parts of the code.
As productivity decreases, management does the only thing they can; they add more staff to the project to increase productivity. But that new staff is not versed in the design of the system. Furthermore, they, and everyone else on the team, are under horrific pressure to increase productivity. So they all make more and more messes, driving productivity further toward zero.
Eventually the team rebels. They inform management that they cannot continue to develop in this odious code base. Management does not want to expend resources on a whole new redesign of the project, but they cannot deny that productivity is terrible. Eventually, they bend to the demands of the developers and authorize the grand redesign in the sky.
A new tiger team is selected. Everyone wants to be on this team because it’s a green-field project. They get to start over and create something wonderful. But only the best and brightest are chosen for the tiger team. Everyone else must continue to maintain the current system.
Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does.
This race can go on for a very long time. I’ve seen it take 10 years. And by the time it’s done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it’s such a mess.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“13 Telegram Alternatives for Your Secure Messaging Needs”
― twinkle shah

“It doesn’t take a huge amount of knowledge and skill to get a program working.
Kids in high school do it all the time.
Getting it right is another matter entirely.
And when you get the software right, something magical happens: You don’t need
hordes of programmers to keep it working. You don’t need massive requirements
documents and huge issue tracking systems. You don’t need global cube farms
and 24/7 programming.
When software is done right, it requires a fraction of the human resources to
create and maintain.”
― Robert C. Martin., Clean Architecture

“Dont ya just Hate . . . Drunk Ass Glitches”
― Kevin Kolenda

“Listening , Testing , Coding , Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something .”
― Kent Beck

“Quality was not a motivating concern in the design, implementation, or standardization of JavaScript. That puts a greater burden on the users of the language to resist the language's weaknesses.”
― Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts