Bug Quotes

• I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones. ("Dr Who")

• One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching. (Steve Jobs)

• The service life of a cobbled up fix is inversely proportional to the time required to slap it together. (Nick Lappos)

• A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an idiosyncrasy. Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like ID 02. ID is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had. (Guy Kawasaki)

• Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? (Brian Kernighan)

• When you say: "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say: "Hey, I got those with the system -- for free." (Linus Torvalds)

• In some cases, all it requires is that you rationally point out that there is a problem. In others, all you can do is turn the other cheek. At the far end of the spectrum are those for whom the only appropriate response is to carve out their still-beating heart and force them to eat it. (Marc Carlson)

• The wages of sin is debugging. (Ron Jeffries)

• Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. (Karl Lehenbauer)

• All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. (Isaac Asimov)

• Every program starts off with bugs. Many programs end up with bugs as well. There are two corollaries to this: first, you must test all your programs straight away. And second, there's no point in losing your temper every time they don't work. (Z80 Users Manual)

• Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Samuel Beckett)

• There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. (Bill Gates)

• The honest truth is that having a lot of people staring at the code does not find the really nasty bugs. The really nasty bugs are found by a couple of really smart people who just kill themselves. (Bill Joy)

• We didn't have to replicate the problem. We understood it. (Linus Torvalds)

• It's harder than you might think to squander millions of dollars, but a flawed software development process is a tool well suited to the job. (Alan Cooper)

• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. (Donald Knuth)

• It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trival details of a program -- such as where its bugs are. (David Keppel)

• There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers. (Steven Levy)

• Act in haste and repent at leisure: Code too soon and debug forever. (Raymond Kennington)

• Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. (Benedikt Heinen)

• The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything. (Theodore Roosevelt)

• Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. (Henry Ford)

• In his errors a man is true to type. Observe the errors and you will know the man. (Kong Fu Zi aka Confucius)

• The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning. (Stephen Jay Gould)

• People get annoyed when you try to debug them. (Larry Wall )

• It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. (Richard Feynman)

• The sum of the bugginess in a system can be far greater than the bugs in the individual products that comprise it, and often exponentially. (Chad Dickerson)

• The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bästards. (Alexander Jablokov)

• The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley. (Robbie Burns)

• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. (Thomas Edison)

• About 90 percent of the downtime comes from, at most, 10 percent of the defects. (Barry Boehm)

• Of all my programming bugs, 80% are syntax errors. Of the remaining 20%, 80% are trivial logical errors. Of the remaining 4%, 80% are pointer errors. And the remaining 0.8% are hard. (Marc Donner)

• The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair. (Douglas Adams)

• Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. (Samuel T Coleridge)

• If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

• I am one of the culprits who created the problem. I used to write those programs back in the '60s and '70s, and was so proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space by not having to put '19' before the year. (Alan Greenspan)

• Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place. (Gordon Bell)

• Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack. (Tom DeMarco)

• I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. (Leo Tolstoy)

• One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected. (Norman Augustine)

• When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. (Richard Pattis)

• It's not the prevention of bugs but the recovery -- the ability to gracefully exterminate them -- that counts. (Victoria Livschitz)

• In a software project team of 10, there are probably 3 people who produce enough defects to make them net negative producers. (Gordon Schulmeyer)

• When trouble is solved before it forms, who calls that clever? (Sun Tzu)

• I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty. ("Sherlock Holmes")

• Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code. (Dan Salomon)

• The gods too are fond of a joke. (Aristotle)