I’ve sometimes found that executives, seeking to refresh and expand their business, instead of trying to understand what that core is, look to cool technologies. They hope to gain market share by moving to the cloud, or by incorporating machine learning or block-chains, often without a clear sense of the problem being solved.

— Daniel Jackson, The Essence of Software

Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design woithout system yields flawed fancies.

— Frederick P. Jr. Brooks, The Design of Design

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack. Oh sure, a basically good product may be marred by defects (think of your Internet browser, whichever one you use). But real quality is far more a matter of what it does for you and how it changes you than whether it is perfectly free of flaws.

— Tom DeMarco, Slack

The X-Men comics use terms like “evolution,” “mutation,” and “genetic code,” purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the literary genre of science. The part that scares me is wondering how many people, especially in the media, understand science only as a literary genre.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Map and Territory

Apple also sued Digital Research for “copying” their user interface in a product called GEM. Digital Research would probably have prevailed eventually, but would have gone bankrupt in the process because Apple had much deeper pockets. It’s somewhat ironic when you realize that the Apple user interface was substantially copied from the Xerox Alto.

— Jonathan E. Steinhart, The Secret Life of Programs