Software Flaws Quotes

All software sucks.

The world is sick of big IT things that don't work.

Defect-free software does not exist.

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.

Every time WhatsApp has to fix a critical vulnerability in their app, a new one seems to appear in its place.

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

PL/1, the fatal disease, belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.

At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years.

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.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, "thinkos," hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.

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

Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.

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