Software Quotes

252 Sourced quotes

Second law: The complexity barrier. Software complexity (and therefore that of bugs) grows to the limits of our ability to manage that complexity.

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.

The entire history of software engineering is that of the rise in levels of abstraction.

The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.

Marshall McLuhan

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Richard Stallman

Whereas object-oriented analysis typically focuses upon one specific problem at a time, domain analysis seeks to identify the classes and objects that are common to all applications within a given domain, such as missile avionics systems, compilers, or accounting software.

[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum. … If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue.

As Cox points out, "Without inheritance, every class would be a free-standing unit, each developed from the ground up. Different classes would bear no relationship with one another, since the developer of each provides methods in whatever manner he Chooses. Any consistency across classes is the result of discipline on the part of the programmers. Inheritance makes it possible to define new software in the Same way we introduce any concept to a newcomer, by comparing it with something that is already familiar."

The business of software building isn't really high-tech at all. It's most of all a business of talking to each other and writing things down. Those who were making major contributions to the field were more likely to be its best communicators than its best technicians.

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.

David Gelernter

All businesses — no matter if they make dog food or software — don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.

The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can; the consequence of this enclosure is a stifling of creativity and innovation. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

Lawrence Lessig

You haven't experienced awkwardness until you've seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

This is a software monopoly but at least it was written by people who care about security, so it's not like Microsoft's monopoly.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

Eric S. Raymond

Everybody has their own India and I think it's a nonsense construction, a real India. The real India might be the India of the villages and certainly there's a lot to be said of the fact that India's heart lies in its villages. But I live 5 miles down the road from Gurgaon with skyscrapers and software companies and back-office projects and call-centers. And that's a very real India too, so I think real India doesn't make much sense— anymore than the real US with apple pie and Thanksgiving and family around campfires; is that anymore real than Manhattan?

William Dalrymple

The major cause [of the software crisis] is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem. In this sense the electronic industry has not solved a single problem, it has only created them, it has created the problem of using its products.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was the software, not the hardware, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

Patricia Churchland

Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.

Deadly weapons as big as a missile-equipped drone and as small as a.50-caliber bullet are now under software control, which could be disastrous if they were hacked.

The images of mankind have become the most basic thing about them. And they're all software, and disembodied.

Marshall McLuhan

I am afraid that this chapter will amply demonstrate the truth of Clarke's 69th Law, viz., "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.

Arthur C. Clarke

The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates — the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

Bjarne Stroustrup