software engineering

• We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

  — David D. Clark

• Far too often, "software engineering" is neither engineering nor about software.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• We do not see that any good can come of experiments which pay no attention to limiting factors that will assert themselves as soon as the small model is scaled up to a usable size.

  — Marvin Minsky

• The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

  — Larry Wall

• The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential — small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.

  — Nicholas Negroponte

• Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.

  — Paul Vixie

• Science vs. Technology: We should know why things must act as they do, to make them act as we want them to.

  — Saul Gorn

• Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the universe which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the Universe is winning.

  — Rick Cook

• Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

  — Alan Kay

• 75: The computing field is always in need of new cliches: Banality sooths our nerves.

  — Alan Perlis

• The main activity of programming is not the origination of new independent programs, but in the integration, modification, and explanation of existing ones.

  — Terry Winograd

• Many people have experience with a program that's gotten out of control. They have an idea. They think they know what they want to do. But when they go to put the idea in, the idea is forgotten by the time they've figured out how to put it in.

  — Ward Cunningham

• Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

  — Douglas Hofstadter

• Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

  — Fred Brooks

• If somebody puts a big list of things up, my question is always: what is the most important thing on that list.

  — Joe Armstrong

• Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.

  — Agile Manifesto signatories

• In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.

  — Niklaus Wirth

• The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

  — Dennis Gabor