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"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." — Sydney J. Harris "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." — Warren G. Bennis "If you have a difficult Task, give it to a lazy person - they will find an easier way to do it." — Hlade's Law "Microsoft is actually a secret Farengi-Klingon alliance designed to cripple the Federation. The Farengi are doing the marketing and the Klingons are writing the code." — Steve Baker "Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all." — John F. Kennedy "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." — Pablo Picasso "Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork." — Sam Ewing "They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction." — Janet Reno "That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer." — Paul Leary "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside." — Robert X. Cringely "Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)" — Dave Barry "I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS." — Larry DeLuca "The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim." — Edsger W. Dijkstra "It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute." — Marvin Minsky "Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Computers are from Hades." "To go forward, you must backup." — Cardinal rule of computing. "If it wasn't backed-up, then it wasn't important." "The problem with computers is they only do what you tell them." "Counting in binary is just like counting in decimal if you are all thumbs." — Glaser and Way. "Counting in octal is just like counting in decimal, if you don't use your thumbs." — Tom Lehrer. "Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks." "If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime." "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't." "My computer's so stupid, it thinks 1 + 1 = 10." "... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." — Robert Firth "Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months." — Clifford Stoll "Just remember: you're not a 'dummy,' no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who - though technically expert - couldn't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it." — Walter Mossberg "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 "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 "Any fool can use a computer. Many do." — Ted Nelson "There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'." — Edward Tufte "The city's central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!" — C3PO "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." — Steve Wozniak "Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked." — Jeff Pesis "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." — Alan Kay "I've finally learned what 'upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." — Dennie van Tassel "A Computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy." — Joseph Campbell "They have Computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction." — Janet Reno "All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent." — David Brower "Everything that can be invented has been invented." — Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899. "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." — The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957. "But what... is it good for ?" — An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip in 1968. "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." — Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977. "640K (of memory) ought to be enough for anybody." — Bill Gates, 1981. "Bill Gates is so rich because he got his wish when he said: 'I wish I had a nickel for every time a PC reboots'." "Microsoft Works." — Oxymoron "The difference between Bill Gates and God is that God's Word works." "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." — Edward V. Berard, "Life-Cycle Approaches" "I had a fortune cookie the other day and it said: 'Outlook not so good'. I said: 'Sure, but Microsoft ships it anyway'." "Mac users swear by their Mac, PC users swear at their PC." "Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame." — M.G. Siriam "The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." — Sydney J. Harris "Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog." — Doug Larson "Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked." — Jeff Pesis "The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec." — Marcus Dolengo "Jesus saves! The rest of us better make backups." "In God we trust, all others we virus scan." "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." — Jeremy S. Anderson "19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM" — End of the word according to Unix; 2^32 seconds after January 1, 1970 "Every operating system out there is about equal... We all suck." — Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine describing the state of the art in OS security, 2003 "Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.'. To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.' " — Dave Barry "The Internet is the world's largest library. It's just that all the books are on the floor." — John Allen Paulos "To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer." — Farmer's Almanac, 1978 "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." — Robert Wilensky "If an infinite number of computer programmers programmed for an infinite number of years, they would eventually come up with a working operating system. Bill Gates, being impatient, gave them two days and took the first one that was finished." "The Internet? Is that thing still around?" — Homer Simpson "The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit." — Nytwind "Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare." — Blair Houghton "Saying Windows 95 is equal to Macintosh is like finding a potato that looks like Jesus and believing you've witnessed the second coming." — Guy Kawasaki "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." — Popular Mechanics, 1949 "No matter how fast your computer system runs, you will eventually come to think of it as slow." "Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand." "Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning." — Rich Cook "Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris." — Larry Wall "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late." — Seymour Cray "That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers." — Larry Niven "For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." — Bill Bryson "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter." — Eric Raymond "A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place." — IEEE Grid newsmagazine "A hacker on a roll may be able to produce - in a period of a few months - something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more." — Peter Seebach "The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability." — Randall E. Stross "A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer." — Bill Gates "Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.” Mosher's Law of Software Engineering "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." — Bill Gates "Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing." — Gerald Weinberg "First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack." — George Carrette "First, solve the problem. Then, write the code." — John Johnson "Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment." — Kent Beck "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." — L. Peter Deutsch "The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit." — Anonymous "Should array indices start at 0 or 1?; My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." — Stan Kelly-Bootle "The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T." — Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, Inc. "And computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By "they" I mean "computers": I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)" — Dave Barry "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." — Al Gore "Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice." — Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual "0x2B | ~0x2B." — Hamlet "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 "True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it." — Timm Martin "It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets." — Alan Cooper "It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins." — Lou Gerstner "We are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated." — Bumper sticker "No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved." — Mark Gibbs "The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It’s up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them." — Linus Torvalds "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming." — Brian Kernigan "Software Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." — Ray Ozzie "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." — C.A.R. Hoare "The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple." — Grady Booch "Javascript is the duct tape of the Internet." — Charlie Campbell "Managing programmers is like trying to herd cats." — Greg Settle "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses." — Bjarne Stroustrup "PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals." — Jon Ribbens "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense." — E. W. Dijkstra "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” E. W. Dijkstra "I think Microsoft named .NET so it wouldn't show up in a Unix directory listing." — Oktal "There is no programming language - no matter how structured - that will prevent programmers from making bad programs." — Larry Flon "Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is." — Larry Wall "Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?" — Richard A. O'Keefe "Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed." — Bob Gray "In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg." — Bjarne Stroustrup "C++ : Where friends have access to your private members." — Gavin Russell Baker "One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that - lacking zero - they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." — Robert Firth "Java is, in many ways, C++ - ." — Michael Feldman "Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders." — Alanna "Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN'T be like." — pixadel "If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." — Robert Sewell "Good code is its own best documentation." — Steve McConnell "Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." — Eagleson's Law "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." — Tom Cargill "Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case." — Francis Glassborow "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) "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." — Bill Clinton "You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families." — Jim McCarthy "As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." — Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 "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 "If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." — Edsger W. Dijkstra "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime." — Michael Sinz "There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works." — Alan J. Perlis "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time." — Bertrand Meyer "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, 'We're sorry, here's a coupon for two more.' " Mark Minasi "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." — Martin Golding "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." — Paul Ehrlich "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." — Mitch Radcliffe "It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years." — John Von Neumann, circa 1949 "Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need." — Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992 "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." — Emperor Charles V (1500—1558) "When someone says: 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done.', give him a lollipop." — Alan J. Perlis "A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant." — Alan J. Perlis "I have the ability to arrange 1's and 0's in such an order that an x86 processor can actually interpret and execute those commands. It's called Computer Programming, but it's the closest that a man can ever get to giving birth in my opinion. And I somehow feel responsible for the future existence and acceptance of my "child". I'd spend hours trying to find the tiny bug that causes my child to misbehave or act strangely. But that's my mild superpower... I make the world a better place by writing mindless back-end programs that no-one will ever see nor even know that it's there. But I know; and that's all that matters." — Alucard "Two languages implementing the same idea must, on pain of death, use different terms." — Feldman's Law of Programming Terminology "I have yet to meet a C compiler that is more friendly and easier to use than eating soup with a knife." — unknown "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt." — Blair P. Houghton "Going from programming in Pascal to programming in C, is like learning to write in Morse code." — J.P. Candusso "Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one." — Kernighan & Plauger "#define QUESTION ((bb) || !(bb))" — Shakespeare "C is not a high-level language." — Kernighan "In C expressions, you can assume that *, /, and % come before + and -. Put parentheses around everything else." — Steve Oualline "Because we are returning a copy for postfix ++ expressions, statements such as (c++)++; won't work as expected." — Weiskamp & Flamig "Evolution of the C programmer:
— Richard Heathfield "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success." — Dennis M. Ritchie "A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors." — Waldi Ravens "The C Programming Language — A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language." — unknown "A UNIX saleslady, Lenore Likes work, but likes the beach more. She found a clever way To mix work with play... She sells C shells by the seashore." "It is easier to port a shell than a shell script." — Larry Wall "19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM" — The end of the word according to Unix (232 seconds after Jan 1st 1970) "VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix." — W. Davidson "The big difference between UNIX and VMS: To do anything on UNIX, you need to know an obscure command. To do anything on VMS, you need to know an obscure option to SET." — unknown "We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0." — Andy Pierson "If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger." — Frank Lloyd Wright Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog." — Doug Larson "If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into committees. That'll do them in." "The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back." "Never let a computer know you're in a hurry." "Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months." — Clifford Stoll "User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean 'idiot.'" — Dave Barry "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." — Edsger W. Dijkstra "Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." — Joseph Campbell "Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living." — Nicholas Negroponte "Three things are certain: Death, taxes, and lost data. Guess which has occurred." — David Dixon, 1998 "Computers, huh? I've heard it all boils down to just a bunch of ones and zeroes.... I don't know how that enables me to see naked women, but however it works, God bless you guys." — From the television show King of Queens, spoken by the character Doug Heffernan "After growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy." — John Pierce "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, Claw Your Way to the Top "But they are useless. They can only give you answers." — Pablo Picasso, about computers "Computers have lots of memory but no imagination." "As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke. It's just like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws." — Scott Adams ('Dogbert') "If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it's done." — Scott Adams "Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes." — Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." — Mitch Ratcliffe "Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?" "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done." — Andy Rooney "Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate it." "Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked." — Jeff Pesis "I haven't lost my mind; I have a tape back-up somewhere." "I just wish my mouth had a backspace key." "Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat 'what if?' questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working." — Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top "Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin." — Robert A. Heinlein "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." — One of Murphy's Laws of Technology "A picture is worth a thousand words but it takes 3,000 times the disk space." "If it draws blood, it's hardware." "In God we trust, all others we virus scan." "It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate." — Nicholas P. Negroponte "RAM disk is not an installation procedure." "The attention span of a computer is only as long as its power cord." "The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec." — Marcus Dolengo "The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little." — Eric Porterfield "Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match. But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role. The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them. In our industry, Bill Gates owns the table until someone proves otherwise." — David Moschella "The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim." — Edsger W. Dijkstra "There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network." — Guy Almes "Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other." — Bill Gates "There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We do not believe this to be a coincidence." — Jeremy S. Anderson "There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!" — Richard P. Feynman "There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer." — J.H. Goldfuss "Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised) are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software." "I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss." — Dave Barry "A user and his leisure time are soon parted." "Apathy Error: Don't bother striking any key." "At least my pencil never crashes!" "DOS computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq, Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form." "Home is where you hang your @." "I wish life had an Undo function." "In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it." "In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they're knocking off servers." — Richard Power "Mac users swear by their computers. PC users swear at their computers." "I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: 'Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'" — Douglas Adams "Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor." — Werner von Braun "Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating." — Martin Reiser, quoted by Nicklaus Wirth, 1995, which spawned 'Grove giveth, and Gates taketh away,' author unknown, referring to CEOs of Intel and Microsoft "The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!" — Richard Feynman "Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." — Doug Gwyn "Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." — Dennis Ritchie "Unix never says 'please.'" — Rob Pike "The Unix philosophy basically involves giving you just enough rope to hang yourself. And then a couple of feet more, just to be sure." "Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result." — Alan Turing, about computers "What boots up must come down." "Computers must be female. No one but the creator understands their internal logic. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else. The message 'Bad command or file name' is about as informative as, 'If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you.' Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for later retrieval. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it." "Computers must be male. As soon as you commit to one you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on. Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the day." "Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++???" —Richard A. O'Keefe "I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." — Alan Kay "Java is, in many ways, C++--." — Michael Feldman "Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed," — Bob Gray "Ever spend a little time reading comp.lang.c++? That's really the best place to learn about the number of C++ users looking for a better language." — R. William Beckwith "The evolution of languages: FORTRAN is a non-typed language. C is a weakly typed language. Ada is a strongly typed language. C++ is a strongly hyped language." — Ron Sercely "PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly). C++ has shown that if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don't seem to mind as much." — James Hague "In the one and only true way. The object-oriented version of 'Spaghetti code' is, of course, 'Lasagna code'. (Too many layers)." — Roberto Waltman "C(++) is a write-only, high-level assembler language." — Stefan Van Baelen "C++ has it's place in the history of programming languages. Just as Caligula has his place in the history of the Roman Empire?" — Robert Firth "The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones." — unknown "In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg." — Bjarne Stroustrup "Hybrid ('half-assed') object languages like C++ are worst of all, as they unite the simplicity of Brainfuck with the inherent security of C and the speed of Perl." — Tony "Cobol: Completely Obsolete Business Orientated Language." "COBOL programs are an exercise in Artificial Inelegance." "If Python is executable pseudocode, then perl is executable line noise." — unknown "Python's a drop-in replacement for BASIC in the sense that Optimus Prime is a drop-in replacement for a truck." — MFen "PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals." — Jon Ribbens "Perl 1.0: All the power of QBasic, the readability of assembly, and the flexibility of DOS batch scripting..." — unknown "If I've got a simple task to do (eg the text-file-of-URLS example) then I knock it up in shell script. By the time that simple task has feature-creeped up to more than 20 lines I start to wish I'd written it in Perl. So I rewrite. By the time that Perl script has crept up to more than 200 lines I start to wish it was written in Python. So I rewrite. By the time that Python script has crept up to 2000 lines I start to wish I'd farmed the job out to a team of programmers, and I give up caring what language its written in and make them do it as a web service. Then I write a small shell script to call their web service. When that shell script has feature-creeped up to more than 20 lines..." — Bazman "Though I'll admit readability suffers slightly..." — Larry Wall "Larry Wall invented Perl. If that doesn't show the mind-twisting effect that religion can have on some people, I don't know what does." — unknown "After Perl everything else is just assembly language." — unknown "I would rather use Java than Perl. And I'd rather be eaten by a crocodile than use Java." — unknown "Question: When do I need xml? Answer: When I need a new buzz word for my resume." — From the W3 XML page "Some languages are designed to solve a problem. Others are designed to prove a point." — Bell Labs saying "Do you program in Assembly?" she asked. "NOP", he said. "In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included." — E.W. Dijkstra "Pascal /n./ A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his grave if he knew about it." — unknown "BASIC programmers never die, they GOSUB and don't RETURN." — unknown "Real programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC after reaching puberty." — unknown "When Roman engineers built a bridge, they had to stand under it while the first legion marched across. If programmers today worked under similar ground rules, they might well find themselves getting much more interested in Ada!" — Robert Dewar A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb." — Lamar Smith, congressman from Texas "AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive." — Jan Horsfall, VP of Marketing for Lycos "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." — attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, computer scientist (1930 -2002) "Computer science is not as old as physics; it lags by a couple of hundred years. However, this does not mean that there is significantly less on the computer scientist's plate than on the physicist's: younger it may be, but it has had a far more intense upbringing!" — Richard Feynman, physicist (1918 - 1988) "Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons." — Popular Mechanics, 1949 "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Humans beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination." — Albert Einstein, physicist and humanitarian (1879 - 1955) "Computers shouldn't be unusable. You don't need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights." — Scott McNealy, co-founder and president of Sun Microsystems "Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet." — Bruce Schneier, in The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention. "Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all." — Charles Babbage, computer scientist (1791 - 1871) "Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we're not going to buy your product." — Joe Keenan, President of Atari, 1976 (responding to Steve Jobs' offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer that he and Steve Wozniak developed) "Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog." — Doug Larson, columnist "I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them." — Isaac Asimov, author (1920 - 1992) "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." — Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM (1874 - 1956) "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems." — Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux "Multimedia? As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the radio on!" — Rory Bremner, comedian "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." — Charles Babbage "Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." — Alan Turing, mathematician and computer scientist (1912 - 1954) "The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier." — Bill Gates "The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier." — Bill Gates "The late Walt Disney built his empire with a mouse. The same can be said about Steve Jobs." — San Francisco Chronicle, February 8, 2004 "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." — Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 "Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users? " — Clifford Stoll, astrophysicist and author "Information wants to be free and Code wants to be wrong." — unknown "A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." — Doug Linder, systems administrator "A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits." — Edsger Dijkstra, computer scientist "Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague... The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." — Edsger Dijkstra "Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. " — Edsger Dijkstra "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg." — Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of the C++ programming language "Commentary: most debugging problems are fixed easily; identifying the location of the problem is hard." — unknown "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." — Bill Clinton, former President of the United States "For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." — Bill Bryson, author, from Notes from a Big Country "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone)." — Eric S. Raymond, programmer and advocate of open source software, from The Cathedral and the Bazaar "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, software engineer and author, from Code Complete "Hey! It compiles! Ship it!" — unknown "Inside every well-written large program is a well-written small program." — Charles Antony Richard Hoare, computer scientist "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 S. Borenstein, computer scientist "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." — Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Corporation "More good code has been written in languages denounced as bad than in languages proclaimed wonderful" — much more." — Bjarne Stroustrup, from The Design and Evolution of C++ "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." — Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, computer scientists and authors, from The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs "Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand." — unknown "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." — Edsger Dijkstra "The C programming language, a language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language." — unknown "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." — Tom Cargill, object-oriented programming expert at Bell Labs "The important point is that the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. Sure, any given feature list can be implemented, given enough coding time. But in addition to coming out late, you will usually wind up with a codebase that is so fragile that new ideas that should be dead-simple wind up taking longer and longer to work into the tangled existing web. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other." — John Carmack, computer game programmer "The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. The terrible temptation to tweak should be resisted unless the payoff is really noticeable." — Jon Bently and M. Douglas McIlroy, both computer scientists at Bell Labs "The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony Number 9." — Erwin Dieterich, programmer "The problem with using C++ ... is that there's already a strong tendency in the language to require you to know everything before you can do anything." — Larry Wall, developer of the Perl language "The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take." — Roy Carlson, University of Wisconsin "The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself." — Alan Cooper, software author, from The Inmates are Running the Asylum "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses." — Bjarne Stroustrup "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." — Charles Antony Richard Hoare "Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code." — Eric S. Raymond "Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning." — unknown "When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot speak English." — unknown "Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who it decides to make friends with." — unknown "It is the way I think. I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things." — Ken Thompson, creator of UNIX, 1999 (from Computer Magazine interview) "If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system." — Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux "Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor." — Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of UNIX "Technically, Unix is a simple, coherent system which pushes a few good ideas to the limit." — Sunil Das, computer scientist "The one thing I stole was the hierarchical file system because it was a really good idea . . ." — Ken Thompson, 1999 (from Computer Magazine interview) "There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." — Jeremy S. Anderson, UNIX systems administrator, and promulgated by Steven Aukstakalnis (Although it is sometimes pointed out that both parts of this quotation are incorrect, that is irrelevant because, according to its author, it was made purely in jest.) "The UNIX legacy is a set of simple and timeless tools that can take years to master but which can perform seeming miracles in seconds in the hands of experienced users." — a Bellevue Linux Users Group member, 2005 "The use of the Unix philosophy just for UNIX was a great waste. Fortunately, Linux came along." — a Bellevue Linux Users Group member, 2005 "Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. " — Henry Spencer, programmer "Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history." — Neal Stephenson, science fiction writer "UNIX is not so much an operating system as a way of thinking." — unknown "UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things." — unknown (generally attributed to a Doug Gwyn, but no information found about him) "UNIX was so successful, in fact, that it was difficult for any subsequently developed operating systems to not be influenced by it." — a Bellevue Linux Users Group member, 2006 "A general principle for all user interface design is to go through all of your design elements and remove them one at a time. If the design works as well without a certain design element, kill it." — Jakob Nielsen, author and consultant on user interfaces "A good website should have at least the usability and usefulness of a good book. But, although rarely fully exploited, it has the potential to be far more usable, largely because of the availability of hyperlinking." — a Bellevue Linux Users Group member, August 2005 "A well-designed and humane interface does not need to be split into beginner and expert subsystems." — Jef Raskin, human-computer interface expert and a designer of the first Macintosh "Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work." — Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory "Computing has gone from something tiny and specialized to something that affects every walk of life. It doesn't make sense anymore to think of it as just one discipline. I expect to see separate departments of user interface, for example, to start emerging at universities." — Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft executive "Most websites today fail basic tests of usability." — Forrester Research "No matter how good your backend systems are, the users will only remember your front end. Fail there and you will fail, period." — Tristan Louis, writer about the Internet "The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." — unknown (but often attributed to a Bruce Ediger) "Usability cost-benefit data shows that including usability in product development actually cuts the time to market and increases sales because usability and ease of use build quality into products and catch many expensive problems early on in the cycle when they can be addressed at lower cost. Finally, working with users from the beginning of a product cycle ensures that the product is being designed so that users will be satisfied." — Claire Marie Karat, human-computer interface researcher at IBM "Usability is critical for any application, but for mass-market software, usability spells success or failure more clearly than any other feature." — Jerrold Grochow, Chief Technology Officer, American Management Systems "Usability really just means making sure that something works well: that a person of average (or even below average) ability and experience can use the thing - whether it's a web site, remote control, or revolving door - for its intended purpose without getting hopelessly frustrated. " — Steve Krug "Usability rules the Web. Simply stated, if the customer can't find a product, then he or she will not buy it." — Jakob Nielsen "User interfaces have to do with people, and computer scientists don't like to work on problems involving people. The classic work on user interfaces that sets the current paradigm was invented outside of universities in industrial research laboratories and government-funded institutes." — Stuart Card, interface researcher at Xerox PARC "... when folks read news online, their eyes go for text first, particularly captions and summaries, and graphics only later." — Bryan & Jeff Eisenberg, usability consultants and authors "AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive." — Jan Horsfall, VP of Marketing for Lycos "It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics." — Denise Caruso, digital commerce columnist, New York Times "I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'" — Mike Godwin, the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and now the senior technology counsel of Public Knowledge "My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them." — Penn Jillette, in a 1995 Compuserve chat "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." — Peter Steiner, cartoon in The New Yorker, July 1993 "The Internet is like a vault with a screen door on the back. I don't need jackhammers and atom bomb to get in when I can walk through the door." — unknown "The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life." — , freelance journalist "The Internet is the Viagra of big business." — Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO, General Electric "The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it." — John Perry Barlow, retired Wyoming cattle rancher, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation "The net is watching you." — Andrew Brown "The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." — Tim Berners-Lee, funder of the World Wide Web "Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design." — Tim Berners-Lee "When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web.... Now even my cat has its own page." — President Bill Clinton, in his 1996 announcement of the Next Generation Internet initiative "With the development of the Internet...we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther." — John Perry Barlow "The computing field is always in need of new cliches." — Alan Perlis "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done." — Andy Rooney "If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee" — that will do them in." — Bradley's Bromide "Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog." — Doug Larson "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." — E. W. Dijkstra "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." — Edsger W. Dijkstra "Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers." — Edward Shepherd Mead "Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining." — Jef Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal "The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little." — Joe Martin, Porterfield "One would think that if you're anonymous, you'd do anything you want, but groups have their own sense of community and what we can do." — John Allen "In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.-- John C. Dvorak "The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." — Nathaniel Borenstein "If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it." — Pierre Gallois "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." — Stephen Hawking "The primary purpose of the Data statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable Pi can be given that value with a Data statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change." — Fortran manual for Xerox Computers "Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the time. The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and the final touches also take 90 percent of the time." — N.j. Rubenking "Version 1 of any software is full of bugs. Version 2 fixes all the bugs and is great. Version 3 adds all the things users ask for, but hides all the great stuff in Version 2." — Fred Blechman "The term reboot comes from the middle age (before computers). Horses who stopped in mid-stride required a boot to the rear to start again. Thus the term to rear-boot, later abbreviated into reboot." — Unknown "You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!" — Unknown "Looking at the proliferation of personal Web pages on the Net, it looks like very soon everyone on Earth will have 15 megabytes of fame." — M.0. Srircim "Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar." — George Lundberg "Any sufficiently advancedbug is indistinguishable from a feature." — Rich Kulowiec "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." — Dwight D. Eisenhower "If E-Mail had been around before the telephone was invented people would have said 'Hey, forget E-Mail - with this new telephone invention I can actually talk to people'. "The difference between E-Mail and regular mail is that computers handle E-Mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.”" — Jamais Cascio "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." — Douglas Adams "I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening." — Ken Thompson "Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy." — Niklaus Wirth "Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020." — Ray Kurzweil "The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do." — Ted Nelson "'Always apply the latest updates' and 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' are the two rules of system administration..." — unknown "If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." — unknown "If it works, leave it alone — there's no need to understand it. If it fails, try to fix it — there's no time to understand it." — Bill Pfeifer "I have a friend who told me that the very best computer system ever built by mankind was by the Druids at Stonehenge. Well, that's an old story. But what I liked was that he felt the Druids didn't die out, they just went bankrupt trying to debug the software." — J. Finke "Assumption is the mother of all fuckups." — unknown "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 W. Kernighan "We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer — and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply." — Tom Van Vleck "...In fact, never ever use gets() or sprintf(), period. If you do we will send evil dwarfs after you." — FreeBSD Secure Programming Guidelines "The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction." — Eric Raymond, "The Art of Unix Programming" "The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit." — unknown "Would you rather Test-First, or Debug-Later?" — Robert Martin "Who is this 'General Protection' and why is he reading my disk?" — unknown "Programmers and old people have a lot in common. They're both always looking for ways to control leaks and dumps." — Ralf "It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa." — unknown "It is twice as difficult to debug a program as to write it. Therefore, if you put all of your creativity and effort into writing the program, you are not smart enough to debug it." "We have a bug that occurs on the 31st of a month so once a month we get a bug report. It gets assigned to a developer within 24 hours who then fiddles for a bit before marking it 'unable to reproduce'." — kosh "Error, no keyboard — press F1 to continue." — unknown "File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)" — unknown "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." — Donald E. Knuth "The first manned space flight had a computer on board to control re-entry, but it was basic in the extreme, and locked so Comrade Gagarin couldn't tamper with it. An envelope with the code to unlock the computer was hidden somewhere in the capsule, and should an emergency arise, ground control would tell him where it was." — unknown "When all else fails, read the instructions." — L. Iasellio "Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success." — Tom DeMarco "The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children." — Linus Torvalds "When in doubt, use brute force." — Ken Thompson "If brute force doesn't solve your problems, then you aren't using enough." — unknown "The definition of an upgrade: Take old bugs out, put new ones in." — unknown "That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers." — Larry Niven "The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes trouble shoots back." — unknown "Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs." — Kernighan "If it's not on fire, it's a software problem." — unknown "Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle." — Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programmers "Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code." — Christopher Thompson "My software never has bugs. It just develops random features." — unknown "The only difference between a bug and a feature is the documentation." — unknown "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime." — Michael Sinz "There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works." — Alan J. Perlis "To work on a program with the compiler in debug mode and then to sell it compiling it without the debug option is like learning to swim with floaters and then taking them off to swim across the Atlantic." — unknown "Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology." — John Tudor |