Rob Pike Quotes

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.

Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

Like any well designed software product, Windows is designed, developed and tested as an integrated whole.

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

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

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

I think it's a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software.

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

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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.

When someone builds a bridge, he uses engineers who have been certified as knowing what they are doing. Yet when someone builds you a software program, he has no similar certification, even though your safety may be just as dependent upon that software working as it is upon the bridge supporting your weight.

I found out that most programmers don't like to test their software as intensely as I do.

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

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.

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

I designed and developed an unbelievable number of applications early in my life.

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

All software sucks.