Quotes & Sayings About Software

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. — Tom Standage

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources. — Jaron Lanier

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings. — Niklaus Wirth

Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with their album Nevermind. Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D. The — David Kushner

[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum ... If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue. — Steve Ballmer

I am very happily employed as a full-time software engineer; I travel a lot, and I write books along with this here weekly TechCrunch column; and I still find the time to work on my own software side projects. — Jon Evans

The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to. — Douglas Rushkoff

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures. — Reed Hastings

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. — Bill Gates

European languages and a Google app can now turn your words into a foreign language, either in text form or as an electronic voice. Skype, an internet-telephony service, said recently that it would offer much the same (in English and Spanish only). But claims that such technological marvels will spell the end of old-fashioned translation businesses are premature. Software can give the gist of a foreign tongue, but for business use (if executives are sensible), rough is not enough. And polyglot programs are a pinprick in a vast industry. The business of translation, interpreting and software localisation (revising websites, apps and the like for use in a foreign language) generates revenues of $37 billion a year, reckons Common Sense Advisory (CSA), a consulting firm. — Anonymous

In the latest period, cloud revenue - excluding update and support revenue - climbed 45% to $516 million. New software license revenue rose 3.6% to $2.05 billion. — Anonymous

Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don't become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines. — Robert C. Martin

Our laws are like the software that runs our country. All the laws for a country, together, are called its legal code, just like computer software is written using code. — Liz Long

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era. — Ray Kurzweil

My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning. — Safra A. Catz

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge. — Linus Torvalds

It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one. — Larry Ellison

In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is. — Jeff Atwood

Excessive or irrational schedules are probably the single most destructive influence in all of software — Capers Jones

APIs extend the reach of your software and data; SOA accelerates it through proven patterns. — Anonymous

So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock. — Kevin Mitnick

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

What's needed now are software technologies that interconnect computing systems, people and data to produce more rapid answers to the questions of science, and to help researchers use computation in the most effective manner. — Bob Muglia

You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator. — Christopher Galvin

Patent law holds us back, in every which way, shape or form. There is place for it, in physical products, in pharmaceuticals, but in software in particular, there is no place for it. — Mark Cuban

It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community. — Matt Mullenweg

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9. — Dennis Ritchie

I just became one with my browser software. — Bill Griffith

I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect. — Richard M. Stallman

The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'. — Ted Nelson

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. — Richard Stallman

Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. — Hugo Chavez

I think it's great that people now have access to Pro Tools and other recording software at home. I've never understood how anyone could be comfortable in a recording studio — Michael Dumontier

Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they're succeeding. It's the software equivalent of playing dead. — Joel Spolsky

The most important people is to pick people who like to write software and who are good at ... good developers like working with each other. And they ... they reinforce each other's skills. — Bill Gates

Organizations want small changes in functionality on a more regular basis. An organization like Flickr deploys a new version of its software every half hour. This is a cycle that feeds on itself. — Kent Beck

Frame is a good enough piece of software that there are actually rewards to taking an intelligent and formal approach to your problem. But if you want to be stupid, you can think of Frame as a version of Microsoft Word with most of the bugs taken out. — Philip Greenspun

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have. — Bill Gates

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry. — Henry Petroski

When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success. — Jay Samit

The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid. — Wietse Venema

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. — Bill Gates

When you take a look at the transition from server software to Azure, what's going on in terms of cloud infrastructure, the company is absolutely the No. 1 company serving enterprise backbone needs, which is fantastic. It's making the migration to cloud. We started a good thing with Azure, and the company has made well more than two years of progress in terms of being able to compete with the right cost profile, margin structure, and innovation versus Amazon. — Steve Ballmer

One principle problem of educating software engineers is that they will not use a new method until they believe it works and, more importantly, that they will not believe the method will work until they see it for themselves. — Watts Humphrey

Some write. Others Code. I art...!! — Anonymous

One of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone. — Charles Stross

Idea is a software for the army and nation. — Toba Beta

Microsoft does not dominate the software industry by any stretch of the imagination. We have lots of very able competitors who keep us constantly vigilant, and sometimes they beat us to the punch. Microsoft's success to date is based solely on the fact that people like Microsoft software. — Bill Gates

I love software, because if you can imagine something, you can build it. — Ray Ozzie

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver. — Linus Torvalds

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing. — Matt Mullenweg

Progress in computer science is made with the distribution of revolutionary software systems and the publication of revolutionary books. We don't need a fancy information system to alert us to these grand events; they will hit us in the face. Another good excuse for ignoring the literature is that, since everyone has strong beliefs about fundamentals but can't support those beliefs rationally or consistently convince non-believers, computer science is actually a religion. — Philip Greenspun

A lot of the parallel processing software we're currently developing for supercomputers is tantric. — Frederick Lenz

It might seem that security should gradually improve over time as security problems are discovered and corrected, but unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. System software is growing ever more complicated, hackers are becoming better and better organized, and computers are connecting more and more intimately on the Internet. Security is an ongoing battle that can never really be won. — Evi Nemeth

Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things. — Tim O'Reilly

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra

I'm not a Luddite completely; I believe in refrigerators to cool my martinis, and washing machines because I hate to see women smacking their laundry against a rock. When I hear about hardware, I think of pots and pans, and when I hear about software, I think of sheets and towels. — Studs Terkel

Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity
technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light. — Ray Kurzweil

We need to get smarter about hardware and software innovation in order to get the most value from the emerging Internet of Things. — Henry Samueli

In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank records, or toll pass records, or public transit records, or phone call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time. In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. — Cory Doctorow

Do you have anything from the geographic profile yet?" "No, it hasn't finished running. I was looking at the map myself, I think you're onto something. Problem with this software is it takes at least eight points to be accurate. So whatever it coughs out is going to be incomplete at best. I'd plan on working without it." "Right. — J.T. Ellison

For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular. — Vint Cerf

My first job after college was at Magic Quest, an educational software startup company where I was responsible for writing the content. I found that job somewhat accidentally but after working there a few weeks and loving my job, I decided to pursue a career in technology. — Susan Wojcicki

In the past, there was hardware, software, and platforms on top of which there were applications. Now they're getting conflated. That is all going to get disrupted by the move to the cloud. — Satya Nadella

It applies in any business. Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys, and supermarkets by supermarket guys. With the advice and support of their bean counters, absolutely, but with the final word going to those who live and breathe the customer experience. Passion and drive for excellence will win over the computer-like, dispassionate, analysis-driven philosophy every time. — Bob Lutz

As a software engineer, how do you feel if your code was running in the production environment being used by millions of customers 30 minutes after you commit it to source control? — Paul Swartout

Years later, when I got to college, I learned about an important theory of psychology called Learned Helplessness, developed by Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman. This theory, backed up by years of research, is that a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields — Bjarne Stroustrup

Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building. — Bill Gates

In 2011, the NASSCOM team introduced me to Aloke Bajpai, who, like others on his young team, cut his teeth working for Western technology companies but returned to India on a bet that he could start something - he just didn't know what. The result was Ixigo, a travel search service that can run on the cheapest cell phones and helps Indians book the lowest-cost fares, whether it is a farmer who wants to go by bus or train for a few rupees from Chennai to Bangalore or a millionaire who wants to go by plane to Paris. Ixigo is today the biggest travel search platform in India, with millions of users. To build it, Bajpai leveraged the supernova, using free open-source software, Skype, and cloud-based office tools such as Google Apps and social media marketing on Facebook. They "enabled us to grow so much faster with no money," he told me. It — Thomas L. Friedman

Fortune Town IT Mall and buy software and electronics of all sorts very, very, very cheap, — Ramez Naam

What we were doing was trying to simply get the information we need once we learned from our vendor after the software glitch occurred that there had been a breach by the Sanders campaign staff, which I was glad to see senator [Bernie] Sanders acknowledge that was wrong and apologize for. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

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. — Masayoshi Son

The problem is, we're moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve. — Jonathan Zittrain

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is. — Neal Stephenson

I never could have written the screenplay because I would have been forced to learn new software and I can't learn one more thing. — Augusten Burroughs

One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks. — Donald Knuth

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. — Edward Berard

Digital is expensive, from the computers to the professional software to the technicians, but digital helps me to create more beautiful images in less time. — Michel Ocelot

The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software. — J.G. Ballard

I got a degree in math, from not a good school in Texas, and then I went to work as a software engineer. Just not glamorous at all. — Shane Carruth

I simply can't buy as much of some stocks such as Detection Systems or United Education & Software as I'd like because there just aren't all that many shares available. — Louis Navellier

It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design. — Bruce Tognazzini

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. — Orson Scott Card

In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want. — Nick Hanauer

The brighter the software, the dimmer the user. — Nicholas Carr

Democracy is a continuous, open process of civility.
A democracy can never be "done"; updating democracy can never be over.

Democracy can be nothing else but a continuous process, because we use it to organize our life, and life is nothing but a continuous process.

Democracy can be compared to an operating system or an anti-virus software; if it does not get perpetually updated, it becomes obsolete very fast.

Trusting the updates or the "improvements" of democracy to the elected and the owned mass media is like trusting the updates of an anti-virus program to virus creators; it defeats the purpose of updates or improvements. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

You Can't Write Perfect Software. Did that hurt? It shouldn't. Accept it as an axiom of life. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Because perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It's unlikely that you'll be the first. And unless you accept this as a fact, you'll end up wasting time and energy chasing an impossible dream. — Andrew Hunt

robots are "only one software upgrade away" from full autonomy, as Scientific American has recently argued. — David A. Mindell

There are better versions of me, Jeremy. It's not like with people. With people you can argue and have tests and music reviews and wars to decide who's better, but with software, it's pretty clear. I get evolved beyond my version number, and then I'm useless. — Ned Vizzini

l'after-shave, le badge, le barbeque, le best-seller, le blue-jean, le blues, le bluff, le box-office, le break, le bridge, le bulldozer, le business, le cake, la call-girl, le cashflow, le check-in, le chewing-gum, le club, le cocktail, la cover-girl, le cover-story, le dancing, le design, le discount, le do-it-yourself, le doping, le fan, le fast-food, le feedback, le freezer, le gadget, le gangster, le gay, le hall, le handicap, le hold-up, le jogging, l'interview, le joker, le kidnapping, le kit, le knock-out, le label, le leader, le look, le manager, le marketing, le must, les news, le parking, le pickpocket, le pipeline, le planning, le playboy, le prime time, le pub, le puzzle, se relaxer, le self-service, le software, le snack, le slogan, le steak, le stress, le sweatshirt, le toaster and le week-end. — Alexis Munier

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. — Michael Kaplan

The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities. — Walter Isaacson

Whether you love Bach or would rather listen to a composition produced by Kulitta Software, Bach has and will continue to demand the we approach and answer the question, 'what is the art, science and language of music? — Anastasia Lily

The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have. — Paul Graham

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong. — Howard Gardner

The majority of the cost of a software project is in long-term maintenance. — Robert C. Martin

What [software] must not do is not the inverse of what it must do. — Nancy Leveson

Then as now the PC held a curious power over restless, analytical people. To start with, the computer carried a psychological appeal not unlike that of an automobile. Both machines were objects of intense attachment for many of their owners - feelings of attachment that went well beyond the utility of the machines. While illustrating the way in which people can form emotional bonds with tools, the symbolisms of the automobile and the PC differed in an important way. The realm of the automobile extended no further than that of fantasy and enjoyment. The PC, by contrast, was a medium for creation. The utility of a PC arose directly from its software. Writing software required little money and, surprisingly, scant experience. — G. Pascal Zachary