Quotes About Software

See whether the DBA laughs at the queries If it doesn't pass the laugh test, it shouldn't go into production. Period.

Well Microsoft really does develop some really interesting technology.

Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.

Chapter 5-"Now THAT'S Leverage" discusses the idea of "software leverage," where reusing components results in greater impact. We see how the use of shell scripts achieves a high degree of leverage.

The new sysadmin won't power down a machine, replace a failing disk drive, reboot, and restore from backup; he'll write software to detect a misbehaving EC2 instance automatically, destroy the bad instance, spin up a new one, and configure it, all without interrupting service. With

The new sysadmin won't power down a machine, replace a failing disk drive, reboot, and restore from backup; he'll write software to detect a misbehaving EC2 instance automatically, destroy the bad instance, spin up a new one, and configure it, all without interrupting service.

You have experience in C programming? That's mainly what we need on that project.

Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the time. The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and the final touches also take 90 percent of the time.

Programming is your spirit, software is your mind, hardware is your body and your physical reality.

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

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.

A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

those with the helpful software were found "to aimlessly click around" as they tried to crack the puzzle.27

Design no longer leads back towards a divine origin, because once shifted into cybernetics it ceases to commensurate with the theopolitical ideal of the plan. Planning is the creationist symptom of underdesigned software circuits, associated with domination, tradition, and inhibition; with everything that shackles the future to the past. All planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp. (298-9)

While any software system introduces some kind of formalization of the world, HCI (like AI) deals with formalizations of human cognition and activity. These are the issues that have lay at the heart of philosophical debate for centuries. In some ways, it would be hard to imagine a more philosophical enterprise.

When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.

Errors in code are what programmers call bugs, though when our programs go wrong, we prefer to call them "unexpected additional features." Very