“When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.”

— Gerald M. Weinberg

M. B. Douthwaite (2002) Enabling Innovation: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Fostering Technological Change. p. 116

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Gerald M. Weinberg22

American computer scientist 1933–2018

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1995/6
About Microsoft

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

“Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: Reengineering the Corporation, 1993, p. 32

“You can't imagine the joy I feel when I hear that something I've said or done or written has helped others to regain their sense of dignity, to motivate them to develop their unique potential, to encourage them to reach out to others in love.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

“The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code, but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol 1051 1996 pp. 1-17 : FME '96: Industrial Benefit and Advances in Formal Methods, Third International Symposium of Formal Methods Europe, Co-Sponsored by IFIP WG 14.3, Oxford, UK, March 18-22, 1996, Proceedings.

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

Donald Knuth's webpage http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)

“When you write a computer program you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions. But when there's a bug — and all programs have bugs — you've got to debug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute … and you iterate. And that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning.”

Nicholas Negroponte (1943) American computer scientist

Nicholas Negroponte: A 30-year history of the future http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_a_30_year_history_of_the_future, July 2014, TED Talks (about 13:40 into 19:43 video). <br class="br">A 30-year history of the future, TED Talk (2014)

“You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html#education; Lecture at Sciences Po in Paris (19 October 2011)] <br class="br">2010s

“In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)

“The simple fact is that code quality tends to improve as you move between platforms… non-obvious bugs on Windows become VERY obvious in the Linux port and vice versa, and thus get fixed. So even the Windows gamers will win in all of this.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in, "Chat with Ryan Gordon" http://web.archive.org/web/20010502182109/http://www.descent-3.com/pad/news/16.html Chrono's Pad (2001-02-11)

“When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.”

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Gerald M. Weinberg22

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