Software Quotes

252 Sourced quotes

What we see in both software development and military operations is a tendency for the pendulum to swing back and forth between extremes. Yet in most cases, we need a balance between armor and discipline and between mobility and agility. Actually, though, I would say that the leaders in both the agile and plan-driven camps occupy various places in the responsible middle. It's only the over-enthusiastic followers who overinterpret discipline and agility to unhealthy degrees.

People who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I'm looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.

Eric S. Raymond

It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should reengineer our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance.

Michael Martin Hammer

About PL/I:

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness — not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean "security breaker."

Richard Stallman

It's not the union between my head and the electronic eye what makes me feel 'cyborg', it's the union between the software and my brain.

The hugely popular Windows 95 operating system revolutionized the software world thanks to its capability of accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of making Bill Gates even richer than he already was.

Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead.

We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects.

Alistair Cockburn

When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

Eric S. Raymond

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

Richard Stallman

A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime.

Steve McConnell

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.

To change the printout of the body, you must learn to rewrite the software of the mind.

It's harder than you might think to squander millions of dollars, but a flawed software development process is a tool well suited to the job.

Excessive or irrational schedules are probably the single most destructive influence in all of software

The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project's outcome; it is to determine whether a project's targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them.

Steve McConnell

Software is usually expected to be modified over the course of its productive life. The process of converting one correct program into a different correct program is extremely challenging.

Douglas Crockford

There are thousands of ways to mess up or damage a software projects, and only a few ways to do them well

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

Trying to apply formal methods to all software projects is just as bad as trying to apply code-and-fix development to all projects.

Steve McConnell

Perhaps the worst software technology of all time was the use of physical lines of code [for metrics]. Continued use of this approach, in the author's opinion, should be considered professional malpractice.

Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.

Richard Stallman

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

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