Software Quotes

252 Sourced quotes

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

The clumsiness of people who have to engage their brain at every step is unbearably painful to watch, at least to me, and that's what the novice-friendly software makes people do, because there's no elegance in them, it's just a mass of features to be learned by rote. However, this suits people a hell of a lot better than setting out at age 6 to become a great ballet dancer and achieving their goal 20 years later after every tendon and muscle and joint has been asked to perform just a little bit more than nature ever intended over and over and over again. To most people, this is insanity. But in reality, it's art, and it's the art in what we do that makes us human.

Software engineering is the part of computer science which is too difficult for the computer scientist.

Friedrich Bauer

Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you're able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.

A cognitive architecture specifies aspects of an intelligent system that are stable over time, much as in a building's architecture. These include the memories that store perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge, the representation of elements that are contained in these memories, the performance mechanisms that use them, and the learning processes that build on them. Such a framework typically comes with a programming language and software environment that supports the efficient construction of knowledge-based systems.

Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware-software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.

We come from geek culture, we come from the free software movement, we have a lot of technologists involved. If we had done the same sort of comparison on poets or artists, I think that we would not have fared nearly as well.

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

Marshall McLuhan

If the software doesn't have to work, you can always meet any other requirement.

Gerald Weinberg

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.

1,3,7-trimethylxanthine – a basic ingredient in quality software.

Object-oriented programming languages support encapsulation, thereby improving the ability of software to be reused, refined, tested, maintained, and extended. The full benefit of this support can only be realized if encapsulation is maximized during the design process.
We argue that design practices which take a data-driven approach fail to maximize encapsulation because they focus too quickly on the implementation of objects. We propose an alternative object-oriented design method which takes a responsibility-driven approach. We show how such an approach can increase the encapsulation by deferring implementation issues until a later stage.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work.

Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side. We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.

In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as Roy Ascott, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and Stephen Willats were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer's role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham's 1968 Artforum essay Systems Aesthetics and his 1970 Software exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century.

Edward A. Shanken

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

Eric S. Raymond

All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.

Marshall McLuhan

Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.

I think managers have realized that most software people are slightly brain damaged, that they're off on their own planets.

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

Neal Stephenson

The truth is, Homo sapiens sapiens is pretty much the same the world over, regardless of skin color or technological development. Racists and provincial types have problems with this fact, but it is a fact. All mortals have the same potential, and only chance determines who's playing a spinet or who's clubbing dinner to death with a big rock. And, you know what? Mortals adapt to the environment in which they're placed. Switch babies between savages and technologicals, and nobody notices! I know, because I've seen it done. I've seen the son of a club-carrying cave dweller fuming because his accounting software wasn't quite adequate for his needs. All humans have the same brain package.

The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.

In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined.

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.

Edward V. Berard

In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......

Edsger W. Dijkstra