Quotes I Like
Starting any significant software project (anything beyond a couple of months and a couple of developers) without taking the time to write some basic document defining the core requirements is professional malpractice. Bertrand Meyer in Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Alan Kay
In software, when something is painful, the way to reduce the pain is to do it more frequently, not less. Jez Humble and David Farley in Continuous Delivery
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. Martin Fowler in Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build. No other part of the conceptual work is as difficult as establishing the detailed technical requirements, including all the interfaces to people, to machines, and to other software systems. No other part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is more difficult to rectify later. Frederick P. Brooks in No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
The average computer user has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed. Edsger W. Dijkstra in A Discipline of Programming
People bet their jobs, their comforts, their safety, their entertainment, their decisions, and their lives on computer software. It better be right. Roger S. Pressman in Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach
A computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. Abelson and Sussman in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs