Software Quotes

252 Sourced quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

Gerald Weinberg

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Friedrich Bauer

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

Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but it's not a crusade – it's just a superior way of working together and generating code.

The fundamentals of language are not understood to this day.... Until we understand languages of communication involving humans as they are then it is unlikely many of our software problems will vanish.

Richard Hamming

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.

Malcolm Gladwell

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

As a design-scientist the artist discovers and perfects language that corresponds more directly to experience; he develops hardware that embodies its own software as a conceptual tool for coping with reality.

Gene Youngblood

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.