Quotes About Software

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?'

Also, because schools must teach the spirit of goodwill, the habit of helping others around you, every class should have this rule: students, if you bring software to class you may not keep it for yourself.

For every job you require a kind of mindset. To be a teacher one should be knowledgeable. To be a software engineer you should know computer data system analysis, computer language etc. So, my mindset is not aligned with politics.

You're not dealing with people," Jerry told him. "These are programmers, boy. Programmers!

The true professional knows that delivering function at the expense of structure is a fool's errand. It is the structure of your code that allows it to be flexible. If you compromise the structure, you compromise the future.

Why don´t you fix bad code when you see it? Your first reaction upon seeing a messy function is ´This is a mess, it needs to be cleaned' . Your second reaction is ´I'm not touching it!´. Beacuse you know that if you touch it you risk breaking it; and if you break it; it becomes yours

Software is like a science. We show correctness by failing to prove incorrectness, despite our best efforts.

But I can write my tests later", you say. No, you can't. Not really. Oh, you can write some tests later. You can even approach high coverage later if you are careful to measure it. But the tests you write after the fact are defense. Tests you write first are offense. After-the-fact tests are written by someone who is already vested in the code and already knows how the problem was solved. There's just no way those tests can be anywhere near as incisive as tests written first.

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code. Note that I used the word failure. I meant it. Comments are always failures.

When you see commented-out code, delete it!

The fundamental assumption underlying all software projects is that software is easy to change. If you violate this assumption by creating inflexible structures, then you undercut the economic model that the entire industry is based on. In

First Law You may not write production code until you have written a failing unit test. Second Law You may not write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail, and not compiling is failing. Third Law You may not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.

Error handling is important, but if it obscures logic, it's wrong.

No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.

In fact, wrapping third-party APIs is a best practice. When you wrap a third-party API, you minimize your dependencies upon it:

The first value of software—behavior—is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software—architecture—is important but never particularly urgent.

If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.

The Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) tells us that the most flexible systems are those in which source code dependencies refer only to abstractions, not to concretions.

Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave

Without tests every change is a possible bug. No

if I must encode either the interface or the implementation, I choose the implementation. Calling it ShapeFactoryImp, or even the hideous CShapeFactory, is preferable to encoding the interface.

1. "First make it work." You are out of business if it doesn't work. 2. "Then make it right." Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. "Then make it fast." Refactor the code for "needed" performance.

We programmers simply do not know how long things will take. This isn't because we are incompetent or lazy; it's because there is simply no way to know how complicated a task is going to be until that task is engaged and finished. But, as we'll see, all is not lost.