Quotes About Technology

More testing should be done automatically. It's important to note that by automatically we meant that the test /results/ are interpreted automatically as well.

As a programmer, you are part listener, part advisor, part interpreter, and part dictator.

perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software.

We frequently hear software development leaders tell their staff, "We should operate like Netflix" (or one of these other leading companies). Of course you could do that. First, get yourself a few hundred thousand servers and tens of millions of users...

Requirements are not architecture. Requirements are not design, nor are they the user interface. Requirements are need.

Let the computer do the repetitious, the mundane—it will do a better job of it than we would. We've got more important and more difficult things to do.

All software becomes legacy as soon as it's written.

While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard.

the real world just won't let us produce much that's truly perfect, particularly not bug-free software. Time, technology, and temperament all conspire against us.

The scope and quality of the system you produce should be specified as part of that system's requirements.

We write code, which communicates our intentions to a machine and documents our thinking for future generations of developers.

Just as woodworkers sometimes build jigs to guide the construction of complex pieces, programmers can write code that itself writes code.

The Internet, [Judy] Singer said, is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it. For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.

Further, the devices being implanted now are different from the ones used even a decade ago. This means that all decisions about how early to implant children are based on speculation rather than experience.

Since the invention of TV, the average night's sleep has gone down by two hours.

Thinking seems to me less persuasive evidence of being than does choosing. Not in our chemistry and not in circumstance does our humanity lie, but in our will to work with the technologies available to us through the era in which we live, through our own character, through our circumstances and age.

The amount of improvement that has occurred in computer technology in the past half century is truly staggering and unprecedented in other industries. ... If cars had improved at this rate in the same time period, a Rolls Royce would now cost 10 dollars and get a billion miles per gallon. (Unfortunately, it would probably also have a 200-page manual telling how to open the door.)

Because technology is devoted primarily to making our lives easier, it discourages us from disciplines, especially ones that involve disentangling ourselves from technology itself.

Technology is in its proper place when it helps us bond with the real people we have been given to love. It's out of its proper place when we end up bonding with people at a distance, like celebrities, whom we will never meet.

We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I'm nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves.

We only get one life to live. Wouldn't it be better spent enjoying and serving the world God made rather than a glowing screen?

Build into every single day an hour, for everyone in the household, free from the promises and demands of our devices.

For almost all of human history, tools were quite limited. They weren't everywhere; they were in specific places. Tools were in the field (agricultural tools) or in the kitchen (cooking tools) or in the toolshed (work tools). And while tools helped us do our work, they didn't work on their own. The dream of a tool that would work by itself was strictly the stuff of magic or fantasy—the sorcerer's apprentice's dream of a broom that would clean up by itself.

But it is certainly true that in the long run that choice is up to us: what we ask our technology to do, what we ask its designers to optimize, what we believe is the good life that we are pursuing together.