Software Evolution Quotes

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.

Successful software always gets changed.

Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time.

Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.

That lack of programmability is probably what ultimately will doom vi. It can't extend its domain.

Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy.

I obviously think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed - just in the last 5 years.

Most programs are not write-once. They are reworked and rewritten again and again in their lived. Bugs must be debugged. Changing requirements and the need for increased functionality mean the program itself may be modified on an ongoing basis. During this process, human beings must be able to read and understand the original code. It is therefore more important by far for humans to be able to understand the program than it is for the computer.

If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

You can go overboard in how quickly you might expect new technologies to transform people's lives. But I very much believe the way software is used, the way information gets distributed, will be dramatically different within 10 years. There is fire to go with all this smoke.

It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.

The only people who don’t love apps are pundits who don’t understand that apps aren’t really in opposition to the open Internet. They’re just superior clients to open Internet services.

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now.

I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.

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

I'm rather pleased with the new manuals. I see Inform now as a gauche young adult, having got past the stage of growing out of his shoes every few months.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.