Quotes About Software

Somewhere in the existing software there was a bug, a potentially lethal flaw. Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do. If he could cleanse the whole machine, then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash. After that, he could perhaps begin to construct a new man.

Who decides what's in Windows? The customers who buy it.

I was lucky to be involved and get to contribute to something that was important, which is empowering people with software.

It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software.

The Joel Test 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do you have a bug database? 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? 6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? 7. Do you have a spec? 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? 10. Do you have testers? 11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? 12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Usability, fundamentally, is a matter of bringing a bit of human rights into the world of computer-human interaction. It's a way to let our ideals shine through in our software, no matter how mundane the software is. You may think that you're stuck in a boring, drab IT department making mind-numbing inventory software that only five lonely people will ever use. But you have daily opportunities to show respect for humanity even with the most mundane software.

When you're designing for extremes with software, the three most important "extremes" to remember are: 1. Design for people who can't read. 2. Design for people who can't use a mouse. 3. Design for people who have such bad memories they would forget their own name if it weren't embossed on their American Express

In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix.

Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.

The confidence you get from knowing about every crash, anywhere in the world, is crucial to delivering a high-quality product that needs to be used in the wild. In the consumer software business, you can't rely on your customers to tell you about crashes—many of them may not be technical enough, and most of them won't bother to take time off of their own important work to give you a useful crash report unless you make it completely automatic.

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.

In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.

The brain is just the physical machine that runs the program called the mind. The brain is the hardware, the mind is the software.

Indeed the most prevalent set of metaphors seems to be that of code as structure: platforms, architectures, objects, portals, gateways. This serves to both depersonify software, diluting the notion of software agency (buildings are passive; it's the architects, engineers, and users who act), and reifying code as an objective construct, like a building, that exists in the world.

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature.

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.

Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work."

if(pot.coffee=EMPTY) {programmer->;brain=OFF};

Windows is just DOS in drag.

Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating.

If Bill Gates had a dime for every time Windows crashes... oh, wait a minute, he already does.

A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages.