Quotes & Sayings About Software Programming

My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects. — Richard Stallman

All of us who attended the meeting - including Microsoft - unanimously agreed that unilaterally extending the Java programming language would hurt compatibility among Java tools and programs, would injure other tools vendors and would damage customers' ability to run a Java-based software product on whatever platform they wished. — James Gosling

Software development is the process of creating a computer software.
It includes preparing a design, coding the program, and fixing the
bugs. The final goal of software development is to translate user
needs to software product, while continuously improving the team
and the process. — Paulo Caroli

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. — Nathaniel S. Borenstein

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made — Robert C. Martin

Even though most people won't be directly involved with programming, everyone is affected by computers, so an educated person should have a good understanding of how computer hardware, software, and networks operate. — Brian Kernighan

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus. — Edsger Dijkstra

The problem with traditional approaches to abstraction and encapsulation is that they aim at complete information hiding. This characteristic anticipates being able to eliminate programming from parts of the software development process, those parts contained within module boundaries. As we've seen, though, the need to program is never eliminated because customization, modification, and maintenance are always required-that is, piecemeal growth. — Richard P. Gabriel

Redundant comments are just places to collect lies and misinformation. — Robert C. Martin

If the application is event-driven, it can be decoupled into multiple self-contained components. This helps us become more scalable, because we can always add new components or remove old ones without stopping or breaking the system. If errors and failures are passed to the right component, which can handle them as notifications, the application can become more fault-tolerant or resilient. So if we build our system to be event-driven, we can more easily achieve scalability and failure tolerance, and a scalable, decoupled, and error-proof application is fast and responsive to users. — Nickolay Tsvetinov

I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect this to be as true in a hundred years as it is today. — Paul Graham

Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software-development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. — Steve McConnell

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. — Douglas Adams

Software sucks because users demand it to. — Nathan Myhrvold

You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time. — Bertrand Meyer

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there. — Gordon Bell

Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don't understand the physics of software and it's rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people. Specifically, it's about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems. — Pieter Hintjens

Before Ruby on Rails, web programming required a lot of verbiage, steps and time.
Now, web designers and software engineers can develop a website
much faster and more simply, enabling them to be more productive
and effective in their work. — Bruce Perens

When the ride was being designed, it was assumed that Kuka's robotic programming could easily produce the various movements called for in each scene. What nobody considered, however, is that the program was designed for maximum industrial efficiency. If, to correspond to the action in a given scene, the Kuka arm had to simulate 22 different motions, the software - not knowing a theme park ride from a diesel assembly line - would think, "OK, let's knock these 22 movements down to 13 and save half a minute." Because this would throw the timing of everything out of whack, Universal ended up having to create a program that would behave as it was told and not be so anal about efficiency. Luckily for us, Universal worked out the kinks, and Forbidden Journey is now remarkably reliable for such an advanced attraction. — Seth Kubersky

As an Agile software development team, we'd been following the hallowed eXtreme Programming tenets, including YAGNI. That is, You Aren't Gonna Need It: a caution to not write unnecessary code - — Anonymous

Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it. — Richard P. Gabriel

Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures. — Douglas Crockford

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time? — James Alan Gardner

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones. — David Gelernter

...I'm not saying simple code takes less time to write. You'd think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn't an accretion of code, it's a distillation of it. — Robert Nystrom

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology. — Daniel Pinchbeck

The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less. — David F. Emery

Truth can only be found in one place: the code. — Robert C. Martin

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write. — Robert C. Martin

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. — Bill Gates

Like so many things in software, MVC was invented by Smalltalkers in the seventies. Lispers probably claim they came up with it in the sixties but didn't bother writing it down. — Robert Nystrom

The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,
fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming. — Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

It is a free software program. You don't have to pay in order to download and install Python, or implement it on your application. Additionally, it will not cost you a thing to modify or redistribute this programming language, because although it is protected by a copyright, it is distributed with an open source permit. — Clarence Patterson

Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs. — David Gelernter

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

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

Good software, like wine, takes time. — Joel Spolsky

Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming. — Bill Gates

To treat programming scientifically, it must be possible to specify the required properties of programs precisely. Formality is certainly not an end in itself. The importance of formal specifications must ultimately rest in their utility -in whether or not they are used to improve the quality of software or to reduce the cost of producing and maintaining software. — Jim Horning

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. — Larry Niven

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. — Neal Stephenson

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management - testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes. — Tilo Linz

Successful software always gets changed. — Fred Brooks

With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power. — Richard Stallman

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. — Joseph Weizenbaum

We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features. — Douglas Crockford

Generative testing is an approach to testing software that was made popular by the QuickCheck library. Originally written in Haskell and since ported to several other programming languages (Ruby, Python, C, C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Java, JavaScript, Erlang, Scala, Clojure...), the QuickCheck library allows the developer to separate test logic from the generation of test cases. This means that, as developers, we can spend less time instructing the compiler how to test our code, and focus instead on what properties we expect our code to have. — Anonymous

I was not in a good space in my life, emotionally particularly, so I needed to do something to recharge my batteries emotionally and musically. I took a break and I learnt software and programming a little bit, and that's how I designed my live machine, which I've been using for years. — Jamie Lidell

The science and engineering of programming just isn't good enough to produce flawless software, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. The — Bruce Schneier

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess. — Ted Nelson

One of the most fulfilling things about programming is that you can turn your dreams into reality. The amount of skill you need varies with your dreams, but generally if you want to develop a certain type of application or service, you can give it a try. Most software comes from necessity or a dream, so keeping your eyes and ears open for things you might want to develop is important. — Peter Cooper

Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential. — Slavoj Zizek

There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with ... nobody can ever improve the software. — Bill Gates

Programming is a social activity. — Robert C. Martin

In this light, continuing to focus efforts on programming each device natively, encoding all the domain knowledge on these devices, may not be the best way to make use of software developers' (and architects') energies. Instead it may make more sense to leverage the network itself; to actually program the network instead of the connected devices. — Cesare Pautasso

Follow your dreams wherever they lead you and pay for those dreams with good jobs in software programming and computer design! — Frederick Lenz

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

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries - without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. — Marc Andreessen