Science Quote by Niklaus Wirth

Software is never “done”; it just reaches a temporary detente with reality. Wirth’s line lands with the cool authority of someone who helped invent the very ground modern programming stands on, and it quietly rebukes the naïve fantasy that correctness is a finish line. In his framing, “practical world” does heavy lifting: not the tidy universe of proofs and toy problems, but the messy ecosystem where requirements mutate, users improvise, hardware shifts, and yesterday’s “satisfactory” becomes today’s liability.

The sentence is built like an engineer’s gentle warning. “Rather uncommon” is polite, almost understated, yet it carries a hard truth: stability is the exception, not the rule. Even “performs correctly and satisfactorily” is a trapdoor phrase. Correct for which inputs? Satisfactory for which stakeholders? Wirth is pointing at the hidden fragility inside those assurances - that they depend on context, and context is the one component you can’t version-control.

The subtext is also a critique of how organizations treat software: as a product you ship, not a living system you steward. Maintenance, in this view, isn’t a regrettable afterthought; it’s the main event. That perspective rhymes with Wirth’s broader ethos (simplicity, disciplined design, understandable systems): change is inevitable, so build so change doesn’t turn into chaos.

Read today, it feels like an early diagnosis of “software eating the world.” If code touches real life, real life will keep reaching back and rewriting it.