Wietse Venema Quotes

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

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

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.

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

All real programs contain errors until proved otherwise which is impossible.

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

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

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

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

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings.

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.

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.

Defect-free software does not exist.

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

Running the test suite like this allows us to catch problems when they are just introduced.

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

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

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.

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

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

I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.