James Gosling Quotes

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

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.

I have this hope that there is a better way. Higher-level tools that actually let you see the structure of the software more clearly will be of tremendous value.

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.

First, I'd like to see the basic tools such as compilers, debuggers, profilers, database interfaces, GUI builders, CAD tools, and so forth fully support the ISO standard.

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.

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.

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.

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.

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.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

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.

I have never written a line of commercial code in my life. Nor should I.

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

All software sucks.

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

In any software work, you have IT consultancy competence required to build the systems.

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

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.

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

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.

The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.