Dave Thomas Quotes

Successful software always gets changed.

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements.

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.

Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever.

When you write a program, think of it primarily as a work of literature. You're trying to write something that human beings are going to read. Don't think of it primarily as something a computer is going to follow. The more effective you are at making your program readable, the more effective it's going to be: You'll understand it today, you'll understand it next week, and your successors who are going to maintain and modify it will understand it.

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

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.

What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.

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.

I know one business, and that's how to make software.

Hosting various versions of my countdown program has kept me extremely busy, and I loved every minute of it.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.

I'm kind of a retired software engineer. I don't write code anymore.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.

Renaming a class at one level is really easy; you just change the name. But how do you change all the references to that class and all the imports?