Shawn Fanning Quotes

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

One of the biggest problems that software developers face is that technology changes rapidly. It is very hard to stay current.

We're not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend on Mono anytime in the near future.

You could summarize everything I did at Apple was making tools to empower creative people. 'QuickDraw' empowered all these other programmers to now be able to sling stuff on the screen. The 'Window Manager,' 'Event Manager,' and 'Menu Manager.' Those are things that I worked on that were empowering other people.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Troubleshooting a wiring problem is a soul-killing experience.

Sun's role in the grand scheme of development is to work on the runtime environment and the APIs. The tools we produce are much more for systems programmers, not enterprise developers.

One of the things I like about the computer that I use is that I can write a program on it or I can download a program on to it and run it. That's kind of important to me, and that's also kind of important to the whole future of the internet... obviously a closed platform is a serious brake on innovation.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Cosmoe is nearing the stage where I would feel comfortable doing a preliminary release aimed at developers.

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.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.