Technology Writers From The United States

"When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous."

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

"When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature."

"The key is to test the areas that you are most worried about going wrong. That way you get the most benefit for your testing effort. It is better to write and run incomplete tests than not to run complete tests"

"I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby."

"I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits."

"There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility."

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality."

"There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory."

"The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates."

"Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics."

"Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow."

"Digital information is really just people in disguise."

"The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much."

"The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the Internet) is the modern version of proving God's existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious "proof" that such adventures are futile."

"People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience."

"There has been over a decade of work worldwide in Darwinian approaches to generating software, and... nothing has arisen from the work that would make software in general any better."

"I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology."

"We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don't really exist, exactly; they're only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful."

"If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources."

"...there is nothing like a 'private home' online, because we don't sleep there, and we don't need toilets or showers there. So a lot of the privacy issues in the real world -- like what the police can seize without a warrant, or whether you have to admit your identity when asked -- don't really play online. Online privacy is seldom about private property, but about access to information."

"Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be 'irreal.' But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn't see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off."

"You're witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone."

"The Kindle is the most successful electronic book-reading tablet so far, but that’s not saying much; Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of e-book reader projects."

"The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades — ka-ching!"

"People won’t start dumping Google en masse; Google is a habit."

"Incredibly, Apple has persuaded Disney, which owns ABC, to make available all episodes of five TV series, including "Lost," "Desperate Housewives" and "That's So Raven." Each show costs $1.99 — an easy impulse buy if you missed an episode. They play back beautifully, with no network logo in the corner, no yearlong wait for the DVD, and no commercials. (One 43-minute "hour" of TV takes 12 minutes to download with my cable modem, and about two minutes to transfer to the iPod over its U.S.B. 2.0 cable.) ...That Mr. Jobs persuaded Disney to dip its pinky toe into these waters is an impressive development — and a very promising sign."

"Five billion dollars a year spent on ringtones? What the?"

"An international team of psychiatrists has flown to Redmond, WA in an attempt to discover exactly what makes Bill Gates tick. And, more especially, what makes him go cuckoo every half hour."

"For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, "Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.""

"Microsoft, as you may have noticed, hasn't exactly been hitting home runs lately. Only a fraction of the population upgraded to Windows 95; much of cor­porate America, having finally got the kinks out of Windows 3.1, has no inten­tion of budging. Suppose, then, that the air gradually begins leaking out of Microsoft's tires. Subsequent Windows versions become absolute monstrosities, laughable bloat­ware that requires 128MB of RAM."

"…the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one […] as one learns, he changes the design […]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…"

"The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: […] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation."

"The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence."

"How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time."

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

"The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. […] Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow."

"Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity […] because they were designed by different people, rather than by God."

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be."

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."

"Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

"Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose."

"The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures."

"…well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think."

"The "Second System Effect": An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used “next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile.""

"Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it."

"Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs."

"The peak of the [Presidential] campaign happened in Albuquerque, where a local reporter said to me, "Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate or are you just running on the issues?""

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"An ancient adage warns, "Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.""