Programmers Quotes - Page 3

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Bill Gates

Success, Trust, Leadership

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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Alan Perlis

Writing, Errors, Two

"Epigrams on Programming". ACM "SIGPLAN" Notices 17 (9), (pp. 7-13), September 1982.

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Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law

Douglas Hofstadter

Law, Research, Favourite

Godel, Escher, Bach ch. 5 (1979)

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I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Memories, Real, Moving

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C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

Dennis Ritchie

Quirky, Computer, Programming

"Inventing Unix". Interview with Samuel K. Moore, Steven Cherry, spectrum.ieee.org. May 27, 2011.

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Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

Ray Ozzie

Frustration, Technology, Challenges

"Burden of the years weighs on Windows" by Steve Lohr and John Markoff, www.nytimes.com. March 26, 2006.

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As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

Maurice Wilkes

Mistake, Technology, Coders

"The Design and Use of the EDSAC". Lecture delivered at the Digital Computer Museum, September 23, 1979.

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The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

Nathaniel Borenstein

Humorous, Learning, Agreement

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The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.

John Ousterhout

Inspirational, Transition, Improvement

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Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

Stan Kelly-Bootle

Funny Inspirational, Technology, Compromise

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Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Rick Cook

Winning, Technology, Race

"The Wizardry Compiled". Book by Rick Cook, 1989.

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As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

David Parnas

Real, Learning, Insomnia

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Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Brian Kernighan

Inspirational, Funny, Smart

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Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

Brian Kernighan

Technology, Essence, Simplicity

Brian W. Kernighan (1981). “Software Tools in Pascal”, Addison-Wesley Professional

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I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one.

David Parnas

People, Missing, Reason

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Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.

Steve McConnell

Errors, Code Quality, Simplicity

Steve McConnell (2004). “Code Complete”, p.501, Pearson Education

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Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes.

Hayley Mills

Learning, Golf, Games

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Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small.

Richard E. Pattis

Learning, Size, Language

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In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Alan Perlis

Errors, Programming, Reborn

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Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.

Lawrence Bossidy

Simplicity, Doe, Programming

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If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.

Bill Joy

Running, Morning, Wall

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Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

Edsger Dijkstra

Powerful, Code Quality, Bells

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1976). “A Discipline of Programming”, Prentice Hall

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A data structure is just a stupid programming language.

Bill Gosper

Stupid, Data, Language

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A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”

Richard Stallman

Mean, Community, Mit

Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing, www.gnu.org. 1996.

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Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

Dick Brandon

Funny, Movie, Sex

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