Source Code Quotes & Sayings

Life would be much easier if I had the source code. — Anonymous

I'm an expert witness in a case that's in appeal about a guy who allegedly misappropriated source code from a major, major company - he actually worked there and then apparently they found it on his laptop later. — Kevin Mitnick

Any type of operating system that I wanted to be able to hack, I basically compromised the source code, copied it over to the university because I didn't have enough space on my 200 megabyte hard drive. — Kevin Mitnick

I will say that 'Source Code' proved to be a very tricky film to shoot. — Michelle Monaghan

The purest case of an intelligence explosion would be an Artificial Intelligence rewriting its own source code. The key idea is that if you can improve intelligence even a little, the process accelerates. It's a tipping point. Like trying to balance a pen on one end - as soon as it tilts even a little, it quickly falls the rest of the way. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

If it is said men oppress women, the husband reacts indigntantly; he feels oppressed: he is; but in fact, it is the masculine code, the society developed by males and in their interest, that has defined the feminine condition in a form that is now for both sexes a source of distress. — Simone De Beauvoir

Do I believe in an old man in the clouds with a white beard judging us mortals with a moral code from one to ten? Good Lord no, my sweet Elly, I do not! I would have been cast out from this life years ago with my tatty history. Do I believe in a mystery; the unexplained phenomenon that is life itself? The greater something that illuminates inconsequence in our lives; that gives us something to strive for as well as the humility to brush ourselves down and start all over again? Then yes, I do. It is the source of art, of beauty, of love, and proffers the ultimate goodness to mankind. That to me is God. That to me is life. That is what I believe in. — Sarah Winman

Open-source code is extremely well-adapted to service-oriented architecture. — Winston Damarillo

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it. — Richard Stallman

The truth is that just as - biologically - males and females are never victims of one another but both victims of the species, so man and wife together undergo the oppression of an institution they did not create. If it is asserted that men oppress women, the husband is indignant; he feels that he is the one who is oppressed - and he is; but the fact is that it is the masculine code, it is the society developed by the males and in their interest, that has established woman's situation in a form that is at present a source of torment for both sexes. — Simone De Beauvoir

Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. "My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish," he said. "I didn't want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help."136 — Walter Isaacson

Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power. — Richard Stallman

George Lucas should have distributed the 'source code' to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius. — Gabe Newell

In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme. — Mary Louise Pratt

Then again, my case was all about the misappropriation of source code because I wanted to become the best hacker in the world and I enjoyed beating the security mechanisms. — Kevin Mitnick

I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principle source of all their other qualities. It acts as a promoter of industry, as a stimulus to enterprise and as the most powerful restraint of public vice ... No government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States with a different code of morals. — Francis Grund

The bank had expanded its services in recent years to offer anonymous computer source code escrow services and faceless digitized backup. — Dan Brown

All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects. — Miguel De Icaza

Time is running out. The seconds are ticking away toward midnight. The human race is about to take the fatal plunge ... Is there any authority left? Is there a path we can follow? Can we find a code book that will give us the key to our dilemmas? We do have authoritative source material. It is found in the ancient and historic Book we call the Bible. — Billy Graham

Personally, I look forward to better tools for analyzing C++ source code. — Bjarne Stroustrup

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works. — Clive Thompson

When the words are fuzzy, the programmers reflexively retreat to the most precise method of articulation available: source code. Although there is nothing more precise than code, there is also nothing more permanent or resistant to change. So the situation frequently crops up where nomenclature confusion drives programmers to begin coding prematurely, and that code becomes the de facto design, regardless of its appropriateness or correctness. — Amari Cooper

We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement
there's no restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave
the motives, desires, the wishes. — B.F. Skinner

would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code. — Various

Nobody really knows what the Bourne shell's grammar is. Even examination of the source code is little help. — Tom Duff

One purpose of CRC cards [a design tool] is to fail early, to fail often, and to fail inexpensively. It is a lot cheaper to tear up a bunch of cards that it would be to reorganize a large amount of source code. — Cay S. Horstmann

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

Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same! — Fernando J. Corbato

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks. — Mitchell Baker

My hacking involved pretty much exploring computer systems and obtaining access to the source code of telecommunication systems and computer operating systems, because my goal was to learn all I can about security vulnerabilities within these systems. — Kevin Mitnick

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all ... — Larry Wall

In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed. — Peter Fenton

No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. — Ken Thompson

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware. — Richard Stallman

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion. — Ray Kurzweil

The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way ... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there. — Bill Joy

If the disk crashes - taking all of your source code with it - and you don't have a backup, it's your fault. Telling your boss "the cat ate my source code" just won't cut it. — Anonymous

The Heartbleed problem can be blamed on complexity; all Internet standards become festooned with complicating option sets that no one person can know in their entirety. The Heartbleed problem can be blamed on insufficient investment; safety review for open source code is rarely funded, nor sustainable when it is. The Heartbleed problem can be blamed on poor planning; wide deployment within critical functions but without any repair regime. — Dan Geer

The "question" is the original open-source code. — Ted Agon

It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to. — Edsger Dijkstra

It's true, I had hacked into a lot of companies, and took copies of the source code to analyze it for security bugs. If I could locate security bugs, I could become better at hacking into their systems. It was all towards becoming a better hacker. — Kevin Mitnick