Quotes About Software

We develop features before infrastructure and frequently show those features to stakeholders.

Dependent Functions. If one function calls another, they should be vertically close, and the caller should be above the callee, if at all possible.

As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.

Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer's first order of business.

Don't depend on volatile things. GUIs are volatile.

When software is done right, it requires a fraction of the human resources to create and maintain. Changes are simple and rapid. Defects are few and far between. Effort is minimized, and functionality and flexibility are maximized.

Remember that the people who read your code will be programmers.

You must understand that when you marry a framework to your application, you will be stuck with that framework for the rest of the life cycle of that application. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, forsaking all others, you will be using that framework. This is not a commitment to be entered into lightly.

You can't make a reusable framework until you first make a usable framework. Reusable frameworks require that you build them in concert with several reusing applications.

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

Of course bad code can be cleaned up. But it's very expensive.

Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don't become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines.

It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

Why do most developers fear to make continuous changes to their code? They are afraid they'll break it! Why are they afraid they'll break it? Because they don't have tests.

I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.

Perhaps you thought that "getting it working" was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.

The mind is like a computer. It runs programs. Most of the software has been poorly written. It is written in the language of fear.

A lot of the parallel processing software we're currently developing for supercomputers is tantric.

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

Consciousness, like a complex system of software, has thousands of levels of nested, self-accessing subroutines

The obnoxious behavior and obscure interaction that software-based products exhibit is institutionalizing what I call software apartheid: