Quotes About Software

It wasn't until five years after the first 360 hardware was introduced in 1964 that all of its software ran well. By then, IBM had spent nearly as much writing the software as designing the hardware. This astonished the company's managers and vividly highlighted "the greatest impediment to advances in computer technology," the problem of managing large software projects. At

Bugs were the backdrop of the code writer's life. A comma in the wrong place. An "if" where there should be a "then." An erroneous call from one piece of the program to another. Each could instantly cause a seizure, the collapse of a finely wrought abstraction into a puddle of ones and zeroes. Only human, software was born to fail. If not catastrophically, then aesthetically. Every software captain knew this.

Having grown rapidly, many PC software companies were stretched to the limit simply building their programs. With customers clamoring for new products, testing inevitably had to take a backseat. In addition, though it was eroding, there remained a pejorative attitude toward testing: "Let the customer test the program." That saved the builder money and time, but it frustrated buyers, who came to view the first release of a program as a gamble. Microsoft

The practice of writing code in C++ continually upset Cutler because it created so much confusion and inefficiency.

Poor performance was a common failing of most new programs. The annals of software amply showed this; nearly every landmark system, from IBM's 360 to the various flavors of Unix to Microsoft's Windows, was released in an immature state and evolved over time to win broader acceptance. Indeed, people expected the first commercial release of a new program to contain flaws of all sorts.

Even seasoned code writers could not dismiss the possibility of being trapped in something akin to an infinite loop, wherein fixes spawned their own bugs. It had happened to others. The history of software was littered with projects, large and small, that had been abandoned in disgust, destroying careers.

By the summer of 1988, Bill Gates was the leading representative of a new breed of tycoon: the software superrich. Just as oil created a kind of royalty in the last century, "wildcat" programmers had emerged among the wealthiest self-made men in America. Paul Allen, who had left Microsoft because of illness, was worth megamillions. So were the founders of other leading software companies. At the age of thirty-three, Gates was the youngest billionaire in the United States.

Gates had a notion that only solid code writers should manage and all managers of code writers should keep writing code.

With software, you know what you have to do," he said, "but it's always a big surprise how long it will take." Miller

Regarding both size and performance, customer preferences were clear. They wanted software that gave speedy results on inexpensive hardware and got great mileage out of memory.

Ballmer's practice of praising the unfinished program was standard procedure in the software industry, in which rivals promised so much, so soon, that one wag coined the term "vaporware" to describe such touted but incomplete programs as NT.

He felt people at IBM worshiped hierarchies. Each employee worried about his little piece of turf and nothing else. Diamond still recalled with amazement the time an IBM programmer, hacking away at OS/2, watched the program crash to a halt. The guy studied his screen for a minute, then said, "Wow, what a nasty problem. Glad that isn't in my code." He restarted his PC and went back to work, never even reporting the bug. At

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Poorly written classes equal unhappy end users. That's not a happy equation.

Don't comment bad code—rewrite it.

Nevertheless, C retains the basic philosophy that programmers know what they are doing; it only requires that they state their intentions explicitly.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)

Programming is about managing complexity: the complexity of the problem, laid upon the complexity of the machine. Because of this complexity, most of our programming projects fail.

The science and engineering of programming just isn't good enough to produce flawless software, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. The

Every young person gets so excited about new software packages and new technology.

This paradox of vision - the genius of youthful ignorance - is nothing new. Had Bill Gates not been in diapers in the early days of computer software, he might have understood that there could never be a market for consumer software - but the 19-year-old Gates went ahead and cofounded Microsoft.

The viewers of video game content on YouTube are young and savvy. They are exactly the sort of people who tend to enthusiastically install ad blocking software.

When I wasn't working, I was learning how to use production software on YouTube and making music.