110 Software Quotes

Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?

A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not just technically but also socially.

Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people.

A lot of people still like Solaris, but I'm in active competition with them, and so I hope they die.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality... :-)

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature :-)

All language designers are arrogant. Goes with the territory... :-)

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident. :-)

The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right. :-)

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*'.

Software is like sex; it's better when it's free.

A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.

... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers ... What they really hate are lousy programmers.

In the Middle Ages people built cathedrals, where the whole town would get together and make a thing that's greater than any individual person could do and the society would kind of revel in that. We don't do that as much anymore, but in a sense this is kind of like building a cathedral.

Logo for the Macintosh: An Introduction through Object Logo (1992)

I don't know if it's what you want, but it's what you get. :-)

We're no longer in the days where everything is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you'll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really know what they were doing.

Unfortunately, many programs are so big that there is no one individual who really knows all the pieces, and so the amount of code sharing you get isn't as great. Also, the opportunity to go back and really rewrite something isn't quite as great, because there's always a new set of features that you're adding on to the same program.

The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.

Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.

Bill Gates is a very rich man today ... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for 'limited times.' By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. Once a company that produces a certain product goes out of business, it has no simple way to uncover how its product encoded data. The code is thus lost, and the software is inaccessible. Knowledge has been destroyed.

I would dramatically reduce the safeguards for software - from the ordinary term of 95 years to an initial term of 5 years, renewable once. And I would extend that government-backed protection only if the author submitted a duplicate of the source code to be held in escrow while the work was protected. Once the copyright expired, that escrowed version would be publicly available from the copyright office. Most programmers should like this change. No code lives for 10 years, and getting access to the source code of even orphaned software projects would benefit all. More important, it would unlock the knowledge built into this protected code for others to build upon as they see fit. Software would thus be like every other creative work - open for others to see and to learn from.

The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can; the consequence of this enclosure is a stifling of creativity and innovation. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.