Programming Related Quotes Taken from the 1960s

Below are a series of surprisingly relevant quotes taken from a book published in the 1970s. Some of the quotes are from the 60s.

• Any Given Program, When Running, is obsolete.


• Any given program costs more and takes longer


• if a program is useful then it will have to be changed


• if a program is useless, it will have to be documented


• Program Complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it


• Not until a program has been in production for at least six months will the most harmful error be discovered


• If the input editor has been designed to reject all bad input, an ingenious idiot will discover a method to get bad data past it.


• Profanity is the one language all programmers know best..


• Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done


• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later


• Fuzzy project objectives are used to avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs


• The effort required to correct course increases geometrically with time.


• Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.