Quotes About Programming

A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

Good programmers know what's beautiful and bad ones don't.

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Fancy optimizers have fancy bugs.

A class, in Java, is where we teach objects how to behave.

The first step in fixing a broken program is getting it to fail repeatably [on the simplest example possible].

He had also written a computer

Python is good enough for code that only has to respond to a single user at human speed, but not usually for code that has to respond at machine speed

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

Mixing languages is better than writing everything in one, if and only if using only that one is likely to overcomplicate the program.

Are the individual functions in your modules too large? This is not so much a matter of line count as it is of internal complexity. If you can't informally describe a function's contract with its callers in one line, the function is probably too large.9 9 Many years ago, I learned from Kernighan & Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style a useful rule. Write that one-line comment immediately after the prototype of your function. For every function, without exception.

We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.

I just really like computers.

The amount of surprise you feel when something goes wrong is directly proportional to the amount of trust and faith you have in the code being run.

By coding at a higher level of abstraction, you are free to concentrate on solving domain problems, and can ignore petty implementation details.

I'm completely addicted to Radio 4, even 100-year-old things like 'Just a Minute.' I even arrange my weekends around the Sunday edition of 'The Archers.'

The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.

I think for business reasons, fiscal reasons, I think these cable networks can take greater risks and I think with a risk comes better programming. And I think USA has got an amazing identity to it now that is clearly defined with its 'Characters welcome' tag.

Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either.