159 Software Development Quotes

Following is our list of software development quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about software engineering.

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Famous Software Development Quotes

Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline. — William J. Clinton

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

Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware. - Ken Olsen

Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware. — Ken Olsen

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra

The amazing thing about software is that you can continually iterate on it. You’re never done. — Jeff Lawson

Education builds software for your brain. — Edward O. Thorp

The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple. — Grady Booch

Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software. — Larry Constantine

Never in the annals of software engineering was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code — Martin Fowler

Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures. — Douglas Crockford

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm. — Alan Perlis

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is. — Dave Barry

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning. — Nicholas Negroponte

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence. — Niklaus Wirth

Design is a process - an intimate collaboration between engineers, designers, and clients. — Henry Dreyfuss

Short Software Development Quotes

  • Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn. — Steve Jobs
  • The hottest new programming language is English. — Andrej Karpathy
  • Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication. — Boris Beizer
  • Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. — Niklaus Wirth
  • Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books. — Alan Turing
  • The single most important thing for any processor is getting adoption by software developers. — Jensen Huang
  • When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis
  • Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. — Brian Kernighan
  • Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking. — Milton Glaser

Software Development Image Quotes

Software development quote The struggle you're in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow.
The struggle you're in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow.

Developer Life Quotes

To achieve the highest accomplishments within the scope of our capabilities in all walks of life we must constantly strive to acquire strong, healthy bodies and develop our minds to the limits of our ability. — Joseph Pilates

Human development, as an approach, is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it. — Amartya Sen

Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. - Ziad K. Abdelnour

Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there. - Stevie Wonder

Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there. — Stevie Wonder

The aim of life is no more to control the mind, but to develop it harmoniously; not to achieve salvation here after, but to make the best use of it here below — Bhagat Singh

It is not the trials in your life that develop or destroy you, but rather your response to those hardships. — Charles Stanley

Software development quote The struggle you're in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow.
The struggle you're in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow.

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life? — Jean Piaget

To learn a thing in life and through doing is much more developing, cultivating, and strengthening than to learn it merely through the verbal communication of ideas. — Friedrich Frobel

Education develops the intellect; and the intellect distinguishes man from other creatures. It is education that enables man to harness nature and utilize her resources for the well-being and improvement of his life — Haile Selassie

True karate is this: that in daily life one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility, and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice. — Gichin Funakoshi

Software Engineering Quotes

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. — Edsger Dijkstra

I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine. — Steven Levy

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. - Donald Knuth

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. — Donald Knuth

Copy and paste is a design error. - David Parnas

Copy and paste is a design error. — David Parnas

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. — Seymour Cray

Software development quote Begin to be what you will be hereafter.
Begin to be what you will be hereafter.

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer. — Steve McConnell

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there. — Gordon Bell

It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes. — Keith Braithwaite

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. — Nathaniel Borenstein

Software Design Quotes

It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. — Albert Einstein

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. - Linus Torvalds

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. — Linus Torvalds

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. — Max Tegmark

Software development quote Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to s
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. — Larry Wall

The trend of design toward simplicity and accessibility in software happened for a reason—simple sells, simple’s usable and simple scales. — Rand Fishkin

The hardest part of design ... is keeping features out. — Donald A. Norman

Software development quote Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.
Life is like photography we develop from the negatives.

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity. — Christopher Zeeman

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry — Ted Nelson

There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent. — Herbert Simon

Software Company Quotes

Invest in startups. Start a company. Create a book, podcast, video. Create a software product. go on many first dates. go to a cocktail party. read a lindy book. move to a big city. buy bitcoin. tweet. — Naval Ravikant

Only drug dealers and software companies call their customers 'users' — Edward Tufte

Companies that make keys, credit card companies, any company in the service business - anything to do with a consumer is probably a software company. — Michael Saylor

Software development quote Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the stepping stones to success.
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the stepping stones to success.

Blockchain software companies may end up being amalgamated into existing software giants, at which point blockchain patents will just become part of the existing patent war. — Vitalik Buterin

Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not. — Marc Andreessen

I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us. — Matt Mullenweg

Software development quote Good leaders develop ideas.Great leaders develop people.The best leaders develop new leaders.
Good leaders develop ideas.Great leaders develop people.The best leaders develop new leaders.

I'm the founder of the McAfee Anti-Virus Software Company. Although I have had nothing to do with this company for over 15 years, I still get volumes of mail asking 'how do I uninstall this software'. I have no idea. — John McAfee

...heavy investments in information technology have delivered disappointing results - largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business...Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. — Michael Martin Hammer

[We in Microsoft] are not the only software company but we are a great software company doing some unique work. — Bill Gates

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. — Orson Scott Card

Computer Software Quotes

Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program. — Linus Torvalds

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. — Brian Kernighan

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry. — Henry Petroski

Software development quote Life is like photography, you use the negatives to develop
Life is like photography, you use the negatives to develop

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software. — Greg Egan

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow. — Craig Reucassel

The novice-friendly software is more like a misbehaving dog: it shits on the floor, it destroys things, and stinks - the novice-friendly software embodies the opposite of what computer people have dreamed of for decades: artificial stupidity. It's more human. — Erik Naggum

Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'... Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover. — Bill Gates

If the genome were a computer, the epigenome would be the software. It instructs the newly divided cells on what type of cells they should be and what they should remain, sometimes for decades, as in the case of individual brain neurons and certain immune cells. — David Sinclair

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended. — Wietse Venema

You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time. — Bertrand Meyer

Computer Programming Quotes

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. — John Von Neumann

Learning is never done without errors and defeat. — Vladimir Lenin

Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’ - Eleanor Roosevelt

Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’ — Eleanor Roosevelt

When I was nine, ten, I was super young, but I installed a program on my computer so I could start producing music. — Martin Garrix

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. — Dennis Ritchie

Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives. — James Gosling

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. — Linus Torvalds

Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. — Donald Knuth

Humans program each other by prompt engineering too, so it's interesting to see that form of programming becoming increasingly prevalent with computers. Programming turns into a kind of applied psychology of neural nets, biological or synthetic. — Andrej Karpathy

Software Quotes

Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon. - Adam Osborne

Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon. — Adam Osborne

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow. — Craig Bruce

Software is the language of automation. — Jensen Huang

With bundled machines you can throw away the hardware and keep the software, and it's still a good buy. — Adam Osborne

There's nothing more frustrating than seeing cynics sit there and say, 'Well, nobody can make any more money because Microsoft and Intel own everything.' Is the software industry mature, or is it embryonic? I would say it's embryonic. There will be a hundred more Microsofts, not just one. — Michael Saylor

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information — Max Tegmark

Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace, run by incorruptible software, offering a global, affordable, simple and secure savings account to billions of people that don't have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund. — Michael Saylor

I basically got an education in software on DuPont's money because they were too stubborn to admit that a recession was coming. — Michael Saylor

The industries that fall first are the industries that either produce electromechanical items that are now inferior to their software substitutes, or the industries that produce a mechanically created service that's now inferior. — Michael Saylor

You don't advise people to buy and hold gold. You advise people to use software that shows ledger entries for gold held by strangers, the security of which relies not only on trust in strangers and their politics, but on PINs and passwords. — Nick Szabo

Open Source Software Quotes

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. — Richard Stallman

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there. — Bill Gates

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial. — Jimmy Wales

But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now. — Bruce Perens

I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner. — Richard Stallman

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. — Linus Torvalds

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia. — Evgeny Morozov

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary. — Jimmy Wales

Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless. — Erik Naggum

Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. — Jim Allchin

Custom Software Quotes

We now know that something between 85 and 90 percent of most software product features are unwanted and unneeded by customers. That is an enourmous ammount of waste of time and money that ends up on the floor. — Steve Blank

Analytical software enables you to shift human resources from rote data collection to value-added customer service and support where the human touch makes a profound difference. — Bill Gates

Software: These programs give instruction to the CPU, which processes billions of tiny facts called bytes, and within a fraction of a second it sends you an error message that requires you to call the customer-support hot line and be placed on hold for approximately the life-span of a caribou. — Dave Barry

This is what our customers are asking for to take them to the next level and free them from the bondage of mainframe and client-server software. — Marc Benioff

We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers. — Trip Hawkins

In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is. — Jeff Atwood

We can collaborate with a Netscape employee or partner who's halfway around the world. We can distribute information and software to customers and shareholders, and get their feedback. — James L. Barksdale

If you want to measure social media ROI, stop wasting your time doing software demos and attending webinars. Just figure out what you want to track, where you can track it, think about both current customers and new customers, and go do it. — Jay Baer

We can provide beta software to our developers in advance of the general public. We can easily link up with external partners, customers, and suppliers. — Jim Barksdale

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs. — Bill Gates

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More Software Development Quotes

Deep Learning is a form of human-assisted but mostly constraint-driven software development. It works because a particular smooth relaxation of program space allows a surprisingly efficient and effective local search. Something like that, my favorite definition. — Andrej Karpathy

To make the analogy explicit, in Software 1.0, human-engineered source code e.g. some .cpp files is compiled into a binary that does useful work. In Software 2.0 most often the source code comprises 1 the dataset that defines the desirable behavior and 2 the neural net architecture that gives the rough skeleton of the code, but with many details the weights to be filled in. The process of training the neural network compiles the dataset into the binary — the final neural network. In most practical applications today, the neural net architectures and the training systems are increasingly standardized into a commodity, so most of the active software development takes the form of curating, growing, massaging and cleaning labeled datasets. — Andrej Karpathy

The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries. — Marshall McLuhan

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop. — Alan Perlis

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. — Stephen Hawking

I developed some unique software to public it on the web that I call the Folklore Project. — Andy Hertzfeld

When to use iterative development? You should use iterative development only on projects that you want to succeed. — Martin Fowler

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. — David Parnas

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer — Bjarne Stroustrup

Nine people can't make a baby in a month. — Fred Brooks

Inadequate use of usability engineering methods in software development projects have been estimated to cost the US economy about $30 billion per year in lost productivity. — Jakob Nielsen

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge. — Jim Highsmith

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them. — Joel Spolsky

Design adds value faster than it adds cost. — Joel Spolsky

I would definitely like to work at Microsoft, since software development and exploring new technologies has always been my passion, and Microsoft is best when it comes to next-generation software technologies. — Arfa Karim

It's harder than you might think to squander millions of dollars, but a flawed software development process is a tool well suited to the job. — Alan Cooper

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. Particularly on large projects, each of the following mismanagement actions has often been responsible for doubling software development costs. — Barry Boehm

High-quality software is not expensive. High-quality software is faster and cheaper to build and maintain than low-quality software, from initial development all the way through total cost of ownership. — Capers Jones

The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity. — Grady Booch

The job of the average manager requires a shift in focus every few minutes. The job of the average software developer requires that the developer not shift focus more often than every few hours. — Steve McConnell

Our technology is very scalable. Our software can accommodate enormous numbers of clients. It's a marvelous opportunity. We'll keep developing products. — Jay Chiat

Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent. — Miguel de Icaza

There are a variety of techniques for breaking software down into pieces and making software development more efficient. Many of these techniques have been sort of... and everybody got excited about but very little benefit was actually derived once the thing was put into practice. — Bill Gates

While Microsoft does not share all of Oracle's ambitions for Java, we agree that it is a very valuable tool for software developers. — Bill Gates

We can provide beta software to our developers in advance of the general public. We can easily link up with external partners, customers, and suppliers. — James L. Barksdale

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

Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer. — Roberta Williams

Before Ruby on Rails, web programming required a lot of verbiage, steps and time. Now, web designers and software engineers can develop a website much faster and more simply, enabling them to be more productive and effective in their work. — Bruce Perens

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name...without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art. — Bill Gates

A lot of the parallel processing software we're currently developing for supercomputers is tantric. — Frederick Lenz

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code. — Richard Stallman

We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects. — Sayings

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