Programming Quotes - Page 20

• Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

  Alan Kay

  Funny Inspirational, Integrity, Technology

  "A Conversation with Alan Kay: Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk — and much more". Interview with Stuart Feldman in ACM Queue, Volume 2, issue 9, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• Design adds value faster than it adds cost.

  Joel Spolsky

  Design, Coders, Add

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• Ethernet always wins.

  Andy Bechtolsheim

  Winning

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• Things which any idiot could write usually have the quality of having been written by an idiot.

  Bram Cohen

  Writing, Quality, Idiot

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• You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you've reached that point, you can only shift the burden around.

  Larry Tesler

  Tasks, Burden, Given

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• All objects transmit their image to the eye in pyramids and the nearer to the eye these pyramids are intersected the smaller will the image appear of the objects which cause them.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Eye, Pyramids, Causes

  Leonardo Da Vinci, General Press (2016). “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, p.44, GENERAL PRESS

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• A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

  Steven Weinberg

  Today, Evidence, Respectable

  "Particle physics, from Rutherford to the LHC". Physics Today, August 2011.

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• MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming.

  Brit Hume

  Class, People, Identity

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• All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.

  Fred Brooks

  Believe, Frustration, Goal

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• I guess some of today's programming has rubbed off on me because I find myself having to set time around for touring, putting that together and then setting time around for recording.

  Bootsy Collins

  Together, Today, Touring

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• The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.

  Lee Child

  Hands, Quality, Cliffs

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• Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Real, Challenges, World

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• To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

  Grace Hopper

  Art, Important, Foundation

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• Programming in Basic causes brain damage.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Brain, Damage, Causes

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• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

  Pablo Picasso

  Funny, Witty, Technology

  Quoted inWilliam Fifield, In Search of Genius (1982)

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• If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

  Shawn Fanning

  Thinking, Computer, Antisocial

  "The Music Swapper: Shawn Fanning". From Interview with Jeff Howe, www.wired.com. August 01, 2005.

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• Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Faster, Software, Hardware

  "Excel HSC Softw Design&Devel + Cards SG". Book by Geoff Lancaster, 2001.

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• Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

  John von Neumann

  Math, Science, Men

  Quoted in Gary Zukav, The DancingWu Li Masters (1979)

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• Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

  Fred Brooks

  Learning, Scientist, Computer Language

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• The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Writing, Learning, Way

  Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie (1988). “C Programming Language”, p.23, Prentice Hall

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• Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Disaster, Certain, Software

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• One principle problem of educating software engineers is that they will not use a new method until they believe it works and, more importantly, that they will not believe the method will work until they see it for themselves.

  Watts Humphrey

  Believe, Principles, Use

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• There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

  Joel Spolsky

  Writing, Thinking, Law

  Joel Spolsky (2004). “Joel on Software”, p.184, Apress

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• There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection.

  Rob Pike

  Broken, Levels, Computing

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• Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.

  Douglas Crockford

  Language, Avoiding, Programmers

  Douglas Crockford (2008). “JavaScript: The Good Parts: The Good Parts”, p.1, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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