Software Maintenance Quotes

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

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.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

One of the advantages of having to live with JUnit for 8 years is now we can look back and see which decisions we made worked nicely and which we would have done differently.

In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

Why the hell do I have to keep updating my apps on my iPhone all the time and why you don't fix that?

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

All software sucks.

Successful software always gets changed.

Although the most advanced software innovation may take place in big cities with research universities, there is a lot of work concerning the application of software to business processes and the administration and maintenance of software systems that can be done remotely.

Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out.

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

Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

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.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard lower the barriers to accountability in software development and increase the value of developer testing.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.

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

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.