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Barnum's Law

anonymous

Brian W. Kernighan

Barry LePatner

Mike Gunderloy on Mashups (via Search VB)

Mike Gunderloy (The Daily Grind)

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Here are some of the great quotes about software development that I have found from around the internet.In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is.Son, better to do lots of mediocre things than one thing that's really good. That way, people will know you were trying, even if you are a little dumb.You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.a Netscape engineer who shan't be named once passed a pointer to JavaScript, stored it as a string and later passed it back to C, killing 30I'd like free CPU cycles too. I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter.Most developers who work with MSSCCI eventually turn to recreational pharmaceuticals in a futile effort to cope.A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality.The best way to predict the future is to implement it.Test takes full responsibility for paper balls in the office and ruthless acts of paper ball terrorism will continue until our demands are met.Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.They want everyone to learn and use CORBA! That should provide us all with many years of entertainment.Ironically, after a series of pay cuts, mandatory overtime, and benefits slashing, the email didn't help improve employee morale.Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.Identify a real need, figure out how to solve it with a minimum number of moving parts and without writing any unnecessary code, and execute it with talent and professionalism.Our marketing professionals are constantly coming up with new ways to make you feel inferior and stupid. Because you are. And we're not.So, Microsoft has relaxed the NDA on Office 12 somewhat - enough that it's safe to say I've had a chance to play with the new user interface and I frankly detest it.When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.This is not to say that design is unnecessary. But after a certain point, design is just speculation.No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.