Niklaus Wirth Quotes

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

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause.

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

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

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

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

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

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

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

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

All software sucks.

For us, the real goal is to make it so that the software ecosystem is as healthy as possible.

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial chance of introducing another.

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

I started working on OpenBSD, and many earlier projects, because I have always felt that vendor systems were not designed for quality.

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.

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.

Something else has happened with computers.

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.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.