Bill Gates Quotes

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

I have never written a line of commercial code in my life. Nor should I.

The most sought-after candidates in the world today by companies like mine are people who make computer software - there's a shortage of talent.

I know one business, and that's how to make software.

I felt there was a need for us to build a new programming language. I also had come to see that Microsoft functions best when it controls its own destiny.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

I designed and developed an unbelievable number of applications early in my life.

Code writers, they are my idols.

I'm kind of a retired software engineer. I don't write code anymore.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

If every sector of business and society will be driven by software - how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?

The way that NetBeans is architected, it's not so much a tool as a tool environment.

In a web/mobile startup, coding is not an outsourced activity. It's an integral part of the company's DNA.

Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

Successful software always gets changed.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)