20th-century Software Engineer Quotes

Linus Torvalds

Eric Schmidt

Marc Andreessen

Kent Beck

Ken Jennings

Grady Booch

Rob Pike

I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

One advantage of static factory methods is that, unlike constructors, they have names.

In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge.

Håkon Wium Lie

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, and in 1776, that's exactly what they meant. Women could not vote, women could not own property, and blacks were considered property. After 200 years of enlightenment, we have realized that gender and race are inappropriate distinctions for determining who has individual rights. Anytime Gov gives you permission they let you know that you have permission by giving you a permit or a license. If you have a marriage license, what permission do you have to do now that you did not have permission to do before, who gave you that permission, and who gave them the authority to give you that permission in the first place?

Michael Badnarik

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...]
Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

Steve McConnell

We offer them mediocrity while calling it magic. We offer them the illusion of intelligent software, seducing them into surrendering the task of thinking to the machine. Of course, the machine isn't thinking, which means that nobody is.

Larry Constantine

Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.

Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S. S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project.

Responsibility-driven design is inspired by the client/server model. It focuses on the contract by asking: What actions is this object responsible for? and What information does this object share?

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.

Playing catch-up with the competition can only ever help you make incremental gains. It will never help you create something new.

[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers.

Marc Andreessen

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

Of the four project development variables - scope, cost, time and quality - quality isn't really a free variable. The only possible values are "excellent" and "insanely excellent", depending on whether lives are at stake.

The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him — because the mails talk about him — even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.

It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of a computer in your own home.

Typically, a subclass augments or redefines the existing structure and behavior of its superclasses.