#software

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. ↗

— Alan Kay

#about #hardware #make #own #people

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. ↗

— Alan Kay

#brute #brute force #done #each #egyptian

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial. ↗

— Jimmy Wales

#lot #making #making money #mind #money

You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works. ↗

— Dave Winer

#every #get #nth #pay #sense

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. ↗

— Niklaus Wirth

#approach #based #careful #come #convinced

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#by the time #copyright #could #domain #effectively

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible. ↗

— Lawrence Lessig

#century #creative #creative works #data #inaccessible

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm. ↗

— Alan Perlis

#bird #early #early bird #makes #often

When you yet to do 100% of what somebody wants, you need a perfect match, and it's pretty rare that you have a perfect match between what you thought people needed and what they actually need. If you try instead to do 80 percent of what they need, there's a pretty good chance you'll hit a sweet spot. ↗

— David Heinemeier Hansson

#requirements #software-development #communication

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing. ↗

— Richard P. Gabriel

#design