Quotes About Software

Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered.

Testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence."- Edsger W. Dijkstra, Computing Pioneer (1930–2002), "Programming as a discipline of mathematical nature," Am. Math. Monthly, 81 (1974), No. 6, pp. 608–12.

We should have suspected that nonhumans were involved right from the start when the activation process didn't involve a lot of arcane commands that had to be done in just the right order, and the destination was displayed as a name rather than using some counterintuitive code. No human software engineer would produce a device that easy to use.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

Apple already had everyone's billing information from iTunes... you could buy things just by typing in your password... That, for the first time, brought very, very easy payment to the modern software world. That, more than anything, is why there is a business for paid apps.

That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.

I write and do all my arrangements on my Mac. And um, I use Logic Pro, which is a great software program.

I don't understand computers. I've been unable to construct a working mental model of how they do what they do. I can break software by looking at it. I can blow anything up. Without trying. It's sort of like being a dowser. And this extreme elaborate clumsiness on my part is actually something people will pay me for. It's quite wonderful.

I would say that hardware is the bone of the head, the skull. The semiconductor is the brain within the head. The software is the wisdom and data is the knowledge.

I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.

The "Tax Complexity Lobby," as Forbes magazine called it, includes tax-preparation firms like H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, as well as companies that make tax-preparation software

We have a company, Geometric Software, which is into engineering services software. We have a company called Nature's Basket, which is into gourmet retailing. Both are specialized companies.

But with Interleaf I don't even have a spell program.

Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you're good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.

Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.

It's time to go, Vitaly says. You're telling me it's time to go? I've been waiting for you to wake up for an hour. As Hiro approaches, Vitaly watches his sword uncertainly. Vitaly's eyes are dry and red, and on his lower lip he is sporting a chancre the size of a tangerine. Did you win your sword fight? Of course I won the fucking sword fight, Hiro says. I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world. And you wrote the software. Yeah. That, too, Hiro says.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. The

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia.