Technology Quotes

Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capabilities of the programmer who must maintain it.

The difference between e-mail and regular mail is that computers handle e-mail, and computers never decide to come to work one day and shoot all the other computers.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.

I can't uninstall it, there seems to be some kind of 'Uninstall Shield'.

A friend called me up the other day and talked about investing in a dot-com that sells lobsters. Internet lobsters. Where will this end? The next day he sent me a huge package of lobsters on ice. How low can you stoop?

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think that the "bricks" are no longer useful. But they will continue to be important.

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.

The only constructive theory connecting neuroscience and psychology will arise from the study of software.

A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.

The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones.

I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told OEMs that if they were going to put a bunch of icons on the desktop, then so were we.

There's a whole kind of hip element to it -- now I need this. Right smack in the middle of the 21st century, sophistication is marrying itself to a very old-fashioned notion of a table where you play games, long before television, video games and home computers. The deck of cards now has become cool again.

Users truly don’t know what they want in a program until they use it.

Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.

Today's meters are little computers.

The technology at the leading edge changes so rapidly that you have to keep current after you get out of school. I think probably the most important thing is having good fundamentals.

Though the Chinese should adore APL, it's FORTRAN they put their money on.

The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent.

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