Nathan Myhrvold Quotes

Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.

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.

Compounding the cost, most mapping software is processor-intense.

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.

Code writers, they are my idols.

Old companies that had nothing to do with software in the past all have software development activities to unlock the invention that's occurring inside of these organizations. And so the developer is a very important part of that overall ecosystem.

When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.

Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

I am not versed in production software. I have basic knowledge, but it ends there.

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

Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade.

It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

In software you can't really add people and expect to get more done, because their ability to understand the program and what's going on it would require so much investment and all their work would require so much review that you'd be more likely to slow things down.

In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.

[...] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer

In programming when you're making a change you have to know all the affected places, and you have to be able to model in your head what the performance impact will be.

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.

We didn't really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.