Another Example Event

You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families. (Jim McCarthy) 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) Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. (Bill Gates) There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. (Alan J. Perlis)

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) I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing. (Oktal) In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. (Anonymous) 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)

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) 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) Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. (Martin Golding) Any fool can use a computer. Many do. (Ted Nelson)