Software Quotes

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

We have over 60 million machines that can take the same diskette, plug it in and immediately ah, that that software's working. And so it's created the worldwide software industry that... that is so very competitive and moving so quickly.

Of course, I have my own limits as to how much game software I can take care of at any one time.

We've been in the Mac software business for more than 20 years. And it's been a great business for us.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

I only use the computer for editing. I don't have an eight-track, otherwise I probably never would have bought a computer. When I first got my Mac, I was exploring its possibilities and had fun with all of the sound hacking software, but I'm not interested in that approach. I toyed with the idea of releasing a 12-inch of all the stuff I did early on but good sense prevented me from doing so.

You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.

If you like your remote messaging fat, dumb, and interoperable, you could also look into the SOAP libraries distributed with Ruby.

Technology no longer consists just of hardware or software or even services, but of communities. Increasingly, community is a part of technology, a driver of technology, and an emergent effect of technology.

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves - those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

When it comes to e-book playback devices and software, I have always thought that the emphasis on ergonomic concerns as a tipping point for the end-user population was misplaced.

Something we have to remember is that everything about the internet is interconnected. All of our systems are not just common to us because of the network links between them, but because of the software packages, because of the hardware devices that comprise it. The same router that's deployed in the United States is deployed in China.

At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it's about destroying value.

Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry

I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you - the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical.

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

Cooperation is just like two pagodas - one hardware and one software. Combined, we can take the leadership position in the world.

We're focused on providing innovations in software, driving the continuous improvement for a much better experience, and there's a lot going on here that speaks to this decade and what's going to happen in this decade. We can kind of sum it up in terms of saying, "Yes, you can."

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.

Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?

Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

The structure of a software system provides the ecology in which code is born, matures, and dies. A well-designed habitat allows for the successful evolution of all the components needed in a software system.

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.

I would say that hardware is the bone of the head, the skull. The semiconductor is the brain within the head. The software is the wisdom and data is the knowledge.

Microsoft unleashed something called Bob, a program that's supposed to make Windows easier to use. Until a Bob helper is born, you can look forward to reading - I swear this is true - Microsoft Bob for Dummies.

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

Building on our successful partnership, we can now bring together the best of Microsoft's software engineering with the best of Nokia's product engineering, award-winning design, and global sales, marketing and manufacturing.

It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

I've never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it [animation drawing].

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes

Apple has never allowed ad-blocking software on the iPhone or iPad. This is one among many reasons that I ditched both. Not because I hate ads all that passionately, but because it's an example of the obsessive corporate control Apple maintains over its environment.

... programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time.

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.