140 Software Quotes

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

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Famous Software Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, I'd like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard. — Bjarne Stroustrup

In many cases the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary. — Linus Torvalds

With multimedia, everything blurs. Software takes the concept of the imagination and makes it something you can edit, tweak, and transform with digital techniques. Everything becomes an edited file. — DJ Spooky

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

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

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

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn. — Steve Jobs

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs. — Seth Lloyd

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

Short Software Quotes

  • It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. — Albert Einstein
  • Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon. — Adam Osborne
  • The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. — Edsger Dijkstra
  • Talk is cheap. Show me the code. — Linus Torvalds
  • Software is the language of automation. — Jensen Huang
  • This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0. — Max Tegmark
  • 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
  • Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. — Donald Knuth
  • Only drug dealers and software companies call their customers 'users' — Edward Tufte
  • When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis

Software Image Quotes

Quality Software Quotes

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

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

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

Impute People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities. — Mike Markkula

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

Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program. — Steve McConnell

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

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality. — Niklaus Wirth

Software never was perfect and won't get perfect. But is that a license to create garbage? The missing ingredient is our reluctance to quantify quality. — Boris Beizer

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copy and paste is a design error. - David Parnas

Copy and paste is a design error. — David Parnas

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

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

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

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

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

Software Design Quotes

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

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

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

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

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do — Dennis Ritchie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Software Company Quotes

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

We will still be enormously profitable and by far the most profitable enterprise software company. — Larry Ellison

The most important thing was the creation of a... a standard, where hundreds of companies build hardware that can all run the same software. — Bill Gates

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

People Writing About Software

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds
quotes on linux, technology and ai

221 1614
Read quotes by Grady Booch

Grady Booch
quotes on ai, leadership and knowledge

11 65
Read quotes by Craig Bruce

Craig Bruce

50 340
Read quotes by Craig Reucassel

Craig Reucassel
quotes on leadership, education and love

36 364
Read quotes by Dave Barry

Dave Barry
quotes on aging, marriage and life

766 5624
Read quotes by Andy Hertzfeld

Andy Hertzfeld
quotes on education, leadership and life

24 315

More Software Quotes

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

There's a strong distinction to be made between dry code smart contracts and wet code's physical law. So law is based on our minds, our wetware - it's based on analogy. The law is more flexible; software is more rigid. Various laws tend to be batched in jurisdictional silos. Software tends to be independent. — Nick Szabo

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

Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties. In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network members, none of whom can alter the code without the consent of the rest. This makes Bitcoin the first demonstrably reliable operational example of digital cash and digital hard money. — Saifedean Ammous

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

If you wanna make money, you should want to make it while adding value. there are lots of rich people who objectively subtracted from human productivity with abuse of switching cost, monopolistic crap software etc etc. pox on that. add value. — Adam Back

In the next 10 years, data science and software will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together. — Vinod Khosla

I think my software is going to become so ubiquitous, so essential, that if it stops working, there will be riots. — Michael Saylor

Within the coming years, disrupting the Bitcoin network will become increasingly more difficult as Bitcoin wallet software and the protocol become more mature and resilient. — Brian Armstrong

Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software. — Jensen Huang

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude. — Douglas Coupland

Bitcoin is the first software network capable of storing all the monetary energy in the world with no loss of power over time and negligible transmission loss. Assuming broad adoption, that would make it the most valuable invention of the modern era. Few understand this. — Michael Saylor

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

Life 1.0: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of Life 2.0: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes. — Max Tegmark

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