Software Quotes

252 Sourced quotes

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

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.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

David Gelernter

The object-oriented paradigm is useful when building software systems where there is a hierarchy defined as a ranking or ordering of abstractions.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

Douglas Coupland

The stagewise and waterfall models. As early as 1956, experience on large software systems such as the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) had led to the recognition of these problems and to the development of a stagewise model to address them.

The job of the average manager requires a shift in focus every few minutes. The job of the average software developer requires that the developer not shift focus more often than every few hours.

Steve McConnell

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.

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 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

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

Bjarne Stroustrup

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

We are a non-utopian political movement. We are not interested in going nowhere. We are not interested in going to some place we have never been, which we will get to after the revolution because people will be different.
The crucial operating premise of the Free Software Movement as a revolutionary politic is: Proof of Concept plus Running code. Here. We did it already. It's sort of working. If you take a copy and help us fix it, it could really be something. Here. You want it? Take it. We like it.
It's Free.

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

GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.

Richard Stallman

What Machiavelli did not write but what the association between political systems and citizens' mental software suggests is that which animal the ruler should impersonate depends strongly on what animals the followers are.