Software design Quotes · Page 2

In software design, it's all about making a guess, trying it, and then learning from the experience.

— Stewart Butterfield

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle…

— Edmund Burke

When we use a language, we should commit ourselves to knowing it, being able to read it, and writing it idiomatically.

— Ron Jeffries

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

— Alan Kay

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

— Stan Kelly-Bootle

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

— Neal Stephenson

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

— Edsger Dijkstra

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.

— Anonymous

If you want a language that tries to lock up all the sharp objects and fire-making implements, use Pascal or Ada: the…

— Scott Fahlman

If you like your remote messaging fat, dumb, and interoperable, you could also look into the SOAP libraries distributed with Ruby.

— Dave Thomas

I have found that meditation has helped me with my academic career and has given me insights into musical composition and software…

— Frederick Lenz

Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

— Erik Adigard

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The…

— Bill Gates

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as…

— Brian Kernighan

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none…

— Marcus J. Ranum

“You can’t control the environments where people use your software. You have to design it to fit. The best place to watch…

— Giles Colborne

If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.

— Alan Cooper

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

— Larry Wall

Java development without a little heresy would be a dull place, and a dangerous one.

— Bruce Tate

Learning research tells us that the time lag from experiment to feedback is critical ...

— Kent Beck

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard…

— Tony Hoare

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

— Hugh Kingsmill

It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of Courage-to move in the opposite direction.

— Albert Einstein

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.

— Richard E. Pattis

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.

— Bjarne Stroustrup

As for a picture, if it isn't worth a thousand words, the hell with it.

— Ad Reinhardt

Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.

— Marvin Minsky

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

— Donald Knuth

The tragedy of our time is that we've got it backwards, we've learned to love techniques and use people.

— Herb Kelleher

“Software will give you respect, but hardware will give you the Power.”

— Akshat Paul

To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.

— Jamie Zawinski

...you can look forward to reading - I swear this is true - Microsoft Bob for Dummies.

— Josh Quittner

... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.

— Dennis Ritchie

Find the simplest model that is not a lie is the key to better software design.

— David Parnas

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity…

— Fernando J. Corbato

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

— Niklaus Wirth

The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything…

— Larry Wall

...wisdom is in large part the knowledge of how to avoid doing dumb things, and thus grows globally as a function of…

— Tim Bray

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against…

— David Gelernter

The Internet is a powerful example of free speech and the free market in action; it is curious that the Net has…

— Denise Caruso