Bill Gates Quotes

If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.

In our firm's earliest days, our understanding of the power of great software engineering and quantitative analytics helped Citadel stand out.

The exciting results from the Hubble, other satellites and probes would not have been possible without innovative solutions to many technical problems.

It has always seemed to me that the best symbol of common sense was a bridge.

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.

It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

We all want to fix things. Just as we all believe that so much in life can be rectified. Mend fences, build bridges, reach out, engage in mutual healing.

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.

The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

No one expected a first year engineering student to build the perfect bridge.

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.