Technology Writers From The United States

"If you write a lot of programs, and you're used to squeezing them all the time, you find that it's easy to write a program that's simple. A lot of it is having a clear sense of what you want to say — writing the proof by choosing what to prove, and being clear about that. In programming, a lot of simplicity comes from knowing what matters and what doesn't matter."

"What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution."

"The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity."

"Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn't tell you a thing. It won't be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficulties."

"I actually enjoy complexity that's empowering. If it challenges me, the complexity is very pleasant. But sometimes I must deal with complexity that's disempowering. The effort I invest to understand that complexity is tedious work. It doesn't add anything to my abilities."

"I could say, "Wait! Wait! I know what's going to happen down here!" Well you knew what was going to happen down here. How does it help us get our job done for me to tell you what's going to happen down here? You could say, "Stop! I want to draw on the white board what we're going to do tomorrow, because I can see it coming." Well maybe I can see it coming too, but why make a commitment? It will come soon enough. So, we're certainly here and now, but I think we can become excellent predictors. It's just that we're careful not to depend upon prediction anymore than we have to."

"I love computer graphics, but every system I've seen to try to turn programming into pictures has lost that syntactic element. There's something about syntax that makes it very precise for reading. I love photography. A photograph will tell a story. But words tell a story even better. Words are more versatile. You can paint a verbal picture that's much richer than you can photograph."

"Many people have experience with a program that's gotten out of control. They have an idea. They think they know what they want to do. But when they go to put the idea in, the idea is forgotten by the time they've figured out how to put it in."

"To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today. The place you leave in the code because you think you'll need it tomorrow, is actually a waste of time today — and a liability tomorrow. It does more harm than good."

"Honest to God, I think Kent Beck's contribution to all this has been taking stuff that he and I discovered quietly together, or picked up from other programmers, and taking it to the limit. Taking it to the limit. And the fact that it actually holds up — and a lot of it improves — when taking it to the limit is why it should naturally be called "Extreme." Kent's single biggest contribution is being daring enough to say, "This is all that matters, and we should do it all the time.""

"Often, the program ends up amazing. You'll say, "This is beautifully architected." Well, where did that architecture come from? In this case, architecture means the systematic way we deal with diverse requirements. Architecture allows us, when we go to do work we need to do on the program, to find where things go. It is a system that was worked into the program by all the little decisions we made — little decisions that were right, and little decisions that were wrong and corrected. In a sense we get the architecture without really trying. All the decisions in the context of the other decisions simply gel into an architecture."

"I like the notion of working the program, like an artist works a lump of clay. An artist wants to make a sculpture, but before she makes the sculpture, she just massages the clay. She starts towards making the sculpture, and sees what the clay wants to do. And the more she handles the clay, the more the clay tends to do what she wants. It becomes compliant to her will. A development team works on a piece of code over several months. Initially, they make a piece of code, and it's a little stiff. It's small, but it's still stiff. Then they move the code, and it gets a little easier to move."

"Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. It was a moment when cheap and abundant print coupled with reliable postal networks triggered an information explosion that dramatically changed the way people thought. [...] Now the Internet is changing how we think again. Just as print took over the once-human task of knowing, cyberspace is assuming the task of knowing where to get what we seek. [...] Now we revel in search, but most of what we search for isn't worth seeking, as the top search lists on Google, Yahoo and Bing make clear. [...] The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson's list — the knowledge of what matters."

"The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace."

"I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy and sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants."

"For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy."

"Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications... We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected."

"Create more value than you Capture"

"Work on Stuff that Matters"

"Learning JavaScript used to mean you weren’t a serious software developer. Today, not learning Javascript means the same thing."

"If you are not paying for the product, you are the product."

"Healthcare is one of the areas where open data will potentially take off soonest and have the biggest impact."

"Just do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers, and lights up the world and scale to that."

"I consider this situation to be dire for Apple. When the iPhone 5 arrives shortly, it will be crunch time for the company. ... It may be the last important iPhone."

"Nobody can deny that Apple is fashionable, and most iPhone users buy the newest so they can be fashionable. To do this right, Apple needs a new phone every quarter."

"[A]s for my prediction that [the iPhone] would be a bad idea for Apple to pursue, anything can still happen. Time is a cruel mistress."

"Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. In fact, he's about as thrilling as dental floss."

"The Apple iPad is not going to be the company's next runaway best seller. Not if the industry can help it. … with the iPad, Apple may have irked its somewhat new partner Intel Corp. Intel gets spanked by nobody."

"I hate to use that term [iPad Killer] since the iPad is probably dead anyway."

"The tablet market has only succeeded as a niche market over the years and it was hoped Apple would dream up some new paradigm to change all that. From what I've seen and heard, this won't be it."

"If [Apple] is smart it will call the iPhone a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures. It should do that immediately before it's too late."

"There was always something about Creative Commons and its name that bugged me, too. The name sounds like a variation of the once-powerful Common Cause political-action committee. A ring of days gone by — nostalgia. All I see here is making the very easy and simple U.S. copyright laws more complex for no apparent reason, except maybe as a protest."

"The absolute deterioration of the wiki concept is just a matter of time. Once spam mechanisms are developed to eat into these systems, the caretakers will be too busy to stop the public-driven deterioration."

"People are always looking for the be-all-end-all super perfect Linux. It will never happen until Microsoft does Linux. Oops. Did I say that?"

"When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"

"The AmigaOS remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 256K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code - there's nothing like it. I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing! You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of the thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant - albeit cultlike - not unlike which you have with Linux, the Unix clone."

"The nature of the personal computer is simply not fully understood by companies like Apple (or anyone else for that matter). Apple makes the arrogant assumption of thinking that it knows what you want and need. It, unfortunately, leaves the “why” out of the equation — as in “why would I want this?” The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a “mouse”. There is no evidence that people want to use these things."

"The Noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this technology succeeding is zilch."

"Apple mentions the Mac less and less at its big events. The company knows that the machine is a drain on resources that detracts from its new core business ... Mac will be phased out and the whole line will be replaced by iPads."

"The computer division of Apple will eventually become a genuine albatross around the company's neck. So it's better off as a standalone company focused on computers."

"Unfortunately, the public is all gaga over the idea of replacing a card swipe with an NFC pass-over using a smartphone. Go ahead and believe that. But if you think it is also hacker-proof, you'll be in for a surprise. It's no safer than using the mattress to stash cash. At some point, you can expect to be robbed blind."

"One thing that always bothers me is the attention the iPhone camera gets. The latest will have image stabilization, advanced phase focus, 4K video, 60 fps video, 240 fps slo-mo, and all sorts of features. That said — these are still just pinhole cameras on steroids. The only good thing they do is allow citizens to take more and more videos of crimes."

"If [Apple's upcoming watch] can't replace the iPhone completely it's a goner."

"[O]ver time, I have come to realize that I was right about the iPhone and the smartphone in general. It has become a plague on humanity and a general annoyance. The iWatch will be worse."

"If Apple has a flaw, it's the inability of the company to crush competition using the kind of aggressive tactics that companies like Microsoft and Intel have always applied."

"Within the decade, Microsoft should have a minimum of 300 stores. They should do as well as the Apple Stores … [Microsoft] is going to experiment with holiday pop-up shops this year in various cities. I predict they will be hugely successful."

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer."

"And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome."

"… and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++)."

"We define idiotarianism as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it."