More wisdom from our vendors, authors, and institutions:

• "One of the benefits of object-oriented languages is that you can upgrade pieces of a program without rewriting the rest of it." -- Java Swing, O'Reilly ISBN 1-56592-455-X
  . . . (Fantastic! That's going to free up most of our programmers.)

• "The Web application will run on machines with 64mb or less of physical memory." -- Rational Software seminar example of a "non-functional requirement", Chicago, April 16, 2003
  . . . (Sorry, you can't run this program. Your machine is too big.)

• "Maximize developer time with automatic memory management and concurrent debugging." - Advertisement by Franz, Inc., ACM Intelligence Fall, 2000, p. 13.
  . . . (Our programmers manage to maximize their time without your help.)

• "Unlike Cobol, Fortran, or even Pascal, object-oriented languages are based on the philosophy of Plato." -- Communications of the ACM, October, 2006, p. 66
  . . . (Would Plato have favored Smalltalk over C++?)

• "The pressure of building software in Internet time is forcing businesses to adapt quickly to new technologies while keeping employees as productive as possible" -- IBM Rational Services brochure D-194C
  . . . (Without that pesky pressure, we could go back to ignoring new technologies and letting our employees be unproductive.)

• "One of the virtues of the C language is that you can program new functions not already on your machine" - Library of Computer and Information Sciences flyer Y-495, promoting a book from Prentice Hall.
  . . . (Would that make C a 4th-generation language?)

• "Unit testing is a time consuming and counter-productive effort . . . " -- Parasoft adverstisement in February, 2003, C/C++ Users Journal
  . . . (Well, if it's counter productive, stop doing it!)

• "Additional airtime is only $0.35 per minute during peak hours and $0.35 per minute during off-peak hours." - flyer from WorldCom Wireless L04/S13-02411953-LA04
  . . . (Well, that's worth staying up late for!)

• "One of the most valuable features of the methods used to solve general linear programming problems is that the methods guarantee that the optimum solution is the best." - IBM publication E20-8171-0, An Introduction to Linear Programming, p. 8.
  . . . (We really hated the older methods where the optimum solution was terrible.)

• "Users are going to want to do things with your parts that you never imagined." - IBM presentation on object-oriented tools, Itasca, Illinois, April 12, 1995.
  . . . (You'd be surprised what we're imagining right now.)

• "Education to include completion of one course in which the individual designed a QSAM file using subroutine to process a master file for designing of a business report. Education to include completion of one course in which the individual coded in JCL for implementation and manipulation of macros for QSAM and VSAM file. Education to include completion of one project in which the individual performed multitasking using QSAM and BSAM." - Recruiting ad in ComputerWorld, August 26, 1996, p.99.
  . . . (You forgot the part about written communications skills.)

• "FORTRAN: Acronym for FORmula TRANslation. The first high-level computer language, developed 1954-1958 by Jim Backus." - Microsoft Press Computer Dictionary, 1991.
  . . . (Later language developers were less myopic.)

• "Windows 3 supports over 550 function calls that applications can use. It is highly unlikely that you will ever memorize the syntax to all these calls." - Charles Petzold: Programming Windows -- The Microsoft Guide to writing applications for Windows 3, 1990, p. 11
  . . . (Just tell us which 200 will be on the final exam.)

• "The paint roller [icon] has been changed to a paint bucket, as an additional enhancement." - User's Guide to OS/2 Warp, IBM publication G25H-7204, p. xiii.
  . . . (That settles it! Now we can justify the upgrade.)

• "/GOD labels the data points in a data range . . . with the contents from a specified data range."
  - Lotus 1-2-3 Reference Manual (release 2, 1985)
  . . . (And on the seventh day /HE rests.)

• "The faculty-student ratio was 8-1 compared to 10-1 in 1998."— flyer sent to Dartmouth College alumni, April, 2007
  . . . (Does that mean the average class size has increased?)

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Last modified 9 April 2007.