Quotes About Software

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

It is easy to sympathize with the MIS staffs around the world, I mean who hasn't lost work due to Windows or a Microsoft application crashing?

Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.

Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent.

I routinely failed to understand that 'simple and straightforward' would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.

When we shipped 'Borderlands 2,' we didn't ship it with a plan of how the level cap was going to increase. We didn't have any software built or strategy in place.

To people who traditionally charge $10,000 for a 3D animating app, we say you should be free-to-play and generate a revenue stream. Think of a 3D modeling package almost like an RPG.

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

I would be amazed if Oracle does not buy NetSuite.

At VMware, we did the virtualization, which is now used extensively across the cloud. Virtualization layers - and containers - are what facilitated the cloud originally.

When it comes to .NET they've done a really outstanding job.

Yes, technology is moving swiftly, but (the High-Tech Illusion again) most of what you're doing is not truly high-tech work. While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static. We still spend most of our time working on requirements and specification, the low-tech part of our work. Productivity within the software industry has improved by 3 to 5 percent a year, only marginally better than the steel or automobile industry.

Is it any surprise that the current center of coffee culture, the city of Seattle, home to the Starbucks coffeehouse chain, is also where some of the world's largest software and Internet firms are based? Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking—plus a dash of revolutionary fervor—has a long pedigree.

Perhaps someone, somewhere already has a primitively aware machine, with its brain equipped with the essential learning software.

As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.

Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So

If you can't find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work.

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker's naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's skepticism.

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker's naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran's skepticism. You have to be able to think how hard can it be? with one half of your brain while thinking it will never work with the other.

Number 1, languages vary in power. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. ITA is an example of this recipe in action. If you want to win in a software business, just take on the hardest problem you can find, use the most powerful language you can get, and wait for your competitors' pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.