Quotes About Software

Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.

Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.

I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives.

Most developer tools try to shield you from actually writing code in constructing the GUI bits or the database bits. Yet when you do write code you usually get glass teletypes where high tech is keyword coloring.

The thing that the Microsoft folks did a really good job of is the easy-to-use tools for making application-building simple.

I will be seen as a software engineer in 'Betaludu.' My character is totally different from what I have played in the past.

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.

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?

In the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.

In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.

The Agat Institute was a God- and state-forsaken outfit inhabited by dead souls and a few disoriented live ones like Yekaterina, who was put to work developing software for the weapons-control system of a nuclear submarine.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995) by

With stable, long-lived teams that own specific bits of the software systems, we can begin to build a stable team API: an API surrounding each team.

Site Reliability Engineering is an approach to the operation and improvement of software applications pioneered by Google to deal with their global, multi-million-user systems. If adopted in full, SRE is significantly different from IT operations of the past, due to its focus on the "error budget" (namely defining what is an acceptable amount of downtime) and the ability of SRE teams to push back on poor software.

building and running software systems is a sociotechnical activity, not an assembly line in a factory.

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as 'bugs' or 'viruses' in, or 'mis-activations' of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.

At the software-architecture level, the complexity of a problem is reduced by dividing the system into subsystems. Humans have an easier time comprehending several simple pieces of information than one complicated piece.

Another good reason to create a class is to model an abstract object—an object that isn't a concrete, real-world object but that provides an abstraction of other concrete objects. A good example is the classic Shape object. Circle and Square really exist, but Shape is an abstraction of other specific shapes.

Levels of Design Design is needed at several different levels of detail in a software system. Some design techniques apply at all levels, and some apply at only one or two. Figure 5-2 illustrates the levels. Figure 5-2. The levels of design in a program. The system (1) is first organized into subsystems (2). The subsystems are further divided into classes (3), and the classes are

developers' estimates tend to have an optimism factor of 20 to 30 percent

Even if you do a few things right, such as making high use of modern programming practices, you might still make a mistake that nullifies your productivity gains.

Object-Oriented Design Heuristics (1996), Arthur Riel

defect corrections have more than a 50 percent chance of being wrong the first time

There is no code so big, twisted, or complex that maintenance can't make it worse.