136 Software Engineering Quotes

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

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Famous Software Engineering 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

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

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering. — Jaron Lanier

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

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

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

Many of the engineers I interviewed worked on reverse-engineering technology. — Annie Jacobsen

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

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

Architecture begins where engineering ends. - Walter Gropius

Architecture begins where engineering ends. — Walter Gropius

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

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

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

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

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

Social engineering bypasses all technologies, including firewalls. — Kevin Mitnick

Short Software Engineering Quotes

  • Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. — Brian Kernighan
  • I like engineering, but I love the creative input. — John Dykstra
  • The hottest new programming language is English. — Andrej Karpathy
  • The technical side of Ethereum's efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise. — Vitalik Buterin
  • In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm. — Alan Perlis
  • Scientists investigate that which already is; Engineers create that which has never been. — Albert Einstein

Software Engineering Image Quotes

Software engineering quote Curiosity is the engine of achievement.
Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

Favorite Quotes

One of my favorite quotes ever was from Slash from Guns and Roses and he said 'to be truly iconic, you need to be able to recognized in a silhouette' — Matthew Healy

Take a deep breath, listen to your favorite song and realize everything is gonna be okay, nothing is permanent. — Camila Cabello

Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes — Immanuel Kant

Software engineering quote Great teachers engineer learning experiences that put students in the driver's seat and then get out
Great teachers engineer learning experiences that put students in the driver's seat and then get out of the way.

The sunflower is a favorite emblem of constancy — Thomas Bulfinch

My favorite thing is to go where I've never been. A Fresh Look at Diane Arbus - Diane Arbus

My favorite thing is to go where I've never been. A Fresh Look at Diane ArbusDiane Arbus

Haters are my favorite. I´ve built an empire with the bricks they´ve thrown at me. Keep on hating. — CM Punk

Software engineering quote To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. — Steve Jobs

I consider myself a crayon... I may not be your favorite color but one day you'll need me to complete your picture. — Lauryn Hill

Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you what you are. - Unknown Author

Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you what you are. — Unknown Author

I love Amsterdam. The city is vibrant and alive. It's fresh and so open. It's definitely one of my favorite places. — Stefon Harris

What Is Engineering Quotes

Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change. — Richard Rohr

Finding oil is a multidisciplinary science. You need a lot of people - statisticians, engineers, and geologists, of course. And what I have learned in the past 30 years is that I read people better than I read books. — Eike Batista

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

Software engineering quote Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time.
Rust rust rust in the engines of love and time.

Go for civil engineering, because civil engineering is the branch of engineering which teaches you the most about managing people. Managing people is a skill which is very, very useful and applies almost regardless of what you do. — John Harvey-Jones

GMOs are found in nearly 80% of processed food in the United States. Currently, up to 92% of U.S. corn is consumed what are you eating GMO with zoe lister-jonesgenetically engineered, as are 94% of soybeans and 94% of cotton. In short, they are everywhere. — Zoe Lister-Jones

What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up. — John Taylor Gatto

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. — Freeman Dyson

What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth...The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth. — Paul Samuelson

What's going to happen is, very soon, we're going to run out of petroleum, and everything depends on petroleum. And there go the school buses. There go the fire engines. The food trucks will come to a halt. This is the end of the world. — Kurt Vonnegut

What I'm trying to do is bring certain of those engineering values into the design process, such that when you think about form you're already incorporating those performance criteria in the process of the generation of forms. — Neri Oxman

Software Development Quotes

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

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

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

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

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis

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

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

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

The single most important thing for any processor is getting adoption by software developers. — Jensen Huang

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

Software Design Quotes

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

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

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

Copy and paste is a design error. - David Parnas

Copy and paste is a design error. — David Parnas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. - Niklaus Wirth

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. — Niklaus Wirth

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

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

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

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 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

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Read quotes by Jaron Lanier

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Read quotes by Douglas Crockford

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More Software Engineering Quotes

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

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

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

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

If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. — Brian Foote

An API that isn't comprehensible isn't usable. — James Gosling

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. — Bjarne Stroustrup

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want. — Niklaus Wirth

Avoiding complexity reduces bugs. — Linus Torvalds

A dynamic duo who work well together can be worth any three people working in isolation. — Larry Constantine

Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer's standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products — Niklaus Wirth

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

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

Code reuse is the Holy Grail of Software Engineering. — Douglas Crockford

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

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed — Martin Fowler

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

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy. — John Baldacci

Don't document bad code - rewrite it. — Brian Kernighan

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

Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'. — Linus Torvalds

A good threat is worth a thousand tests. — Boris Beizer

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 they will not believe the method will work until they see it for themselves. — Watts Humphrey

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

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. — Rick Cook

A brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work. — Steve McConnell

The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner — Jim Highsmith

You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up. — Tony Hoare

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident. — Larry Wall

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

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