Software Quotes

598 quotes by 321 authors

It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it. — Steve McConnell
It's better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive. — Steve McConnell
An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. — Bjarne Stroustrup
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. — Bjarne Stroustrup
If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. — Edward Yourdon
Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are… — Alan Turing
The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay. — Tony Hoare
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. — Tony Hoare
When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed. — Martin Fowler
... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed. — Dennis Ritchie
The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state. — John Ousterhout
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity. — William Wulf
Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little. — Bertrand Meyer
One principle problem of educating software engineers is that they will not use a new method until they believe it works and, more importantly, that… — Watts Humphrey
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. — Niklaus Wirth
If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, you are not ready to code it. — Richard E. Pattis
... programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a… — Steve McConnell
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. — Fred Brooks
Experience doesn't necessarily teach anything. — Gerald Weinberg
Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software. — Larry Constantine

Who Wrote These Software Quotes

321 authors contributed a total of 598 Software Quotes, led by these top contributors: