mPhone
Here you will find a list of assorted quotes and profound (and funny) wisdom from an assortment of people over the years who dwell in the land of Tech. Got any others?
“…one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.”
Robert FirthAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Andy FinkelBradley’s Bromide:
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee…
that will do them in.By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
Ashleigh Brilliant“Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers.”
Chip SalzenbergUnix: it’s a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there.
Laws of Computer Programming
1. Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
2. Any given program costs more and takes longer.
3. If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
4. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
5. Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.
6. The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output.
7. Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it.
8. Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers cannot write in English.SIGPLAN Notices, Vol 2 No 2
“If you own a set of tiny screwdrivers and actually know where they are, you’re addicted to computers.” Dave Barry
Nice!
Laws of Computer Programming
9. If architects built buildings,
like programmers built programs,
the first woodpecker to come along would utterly destroy civilization.
That’s my favorite one. My worst story was making a menu for a bank, back in ’88 in DBase III+, because the people had to use the DO command to execute their programs.
So I make a nice menu system, using INKEY(), so you just have to type the first letter – number of a menu option to run program or go into a submenu.
The lady, wanting menu option #5, well, pressed the F5 key, etc. That’s what she does on the mainframe screens.
Of course I got a panicky phone call. Back in the day, DBase III+, like Wordperfect, would actually use the F keys with pre-programmed macros. Multiple characters!
Needless to say, it wasn’t the end of the month, and she ended up doing the end-of-month processing, totally destroying a few week’s worth of data entry.
Because I hadn’t programmed a pop-up, with Are You Sure (Y/N)? and flushing out the keyboard buffer just before.
So of course, the data loss was my fault !
Of course, no backup !
Helpdesk call from an R&D engineer’s secretary:
You better get someone up here right away….. He’s got a screw driver and is starting to take the computer apart!
You had to be there . . .
#3…. if you develop better idiot proofing, they develop better idiots.
Grabbing my copy of the little Red Book called Quotations from Chairman Morrow, (publ in 1984 with a fwd by JC Dvorak no less) I find:
“People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They’re wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.”
“A technologically reckless person is one who knows just enough technology to be dangerous but not enough to be cautious.”
“The computer’s hardware is its body; the software is its soul.”
and, about Software development schedules…
“Ninety percent of the software gets written in 10 percent of the time. The next 9.5 percent takes 90 percent of the time. The last one-half percent never gets done. But the software still sold.”
I’ve always preferred a variation of the above, “The first 90 percent takes 90 percent of the time, and the last 90 percent takes the other 90 percent of the time.”
#3
Architects DO build buildings, like programmers built programs; It’s the job of the Civil engineer to make that amorphous pile of junk stable.
They forgot one rule of computing:
If I had one dollar every time a mac fans says “My iMac can outperform your PC” I’d be richer than Bill Gates XD
“Programs cannot be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious.”
Take a look at
http://www.qdb.us
http://www.bash.org
for thousands more.
As a programmer and software tester of 25 years one of my favorite quotes like this is, uh, by me as far as I can remember:
Software is the smoke and mirrors of hardware.
I found Apple’s mission statement (and Vista’s):