Buggy Software
by Robert Wynne (with a steal from Dave Weingart)
Music: “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds
© 2000

Buggy software on my desktop
Buggy software built of hacky-tacky
Buggy software on my desktop
And it crashes all the time
There’s some perl code
and some C code
And I’d swear that’s some Fortran there
And it’s jumbled like spaghetti
And it crashes all the time

And the programmers at Microsoft
And Apple and Sun Microsystems
Hack out all this buggy software
So it crashes all the time
There’s a C hack
And a Perl hack
And an Object-oriented hack
And they write code in the wee hours
And they’re crashing all the time

And the boys down in Marketing
Design the pretty boxes so
When the code has been hacked up
It can be shipped out on time
There’s a blue box
And a red box
And an round multi-colored box
And they don’t care if the code runs
If it still ships out on time

Buggy software on my desktop
Buggy software built of hacky-tacky
Buggy software on my desktop
And it crashes all the time
There’s some perl code
and some C code
And I’d swear that’s some Pascal there
And it’s jumbled like spaghetti
And it crashes all the time
This was inspired by a thread on rec.music.filk. Note that I don’t single out any particular vendor or platform as a target — I wholly subscribe the theory that “All software sucks.”