Quotes About Programming

I don't really know much about TV and what people want to see. I'm not that well-informed about it.

I have never designed a language for its own sake.

When I announced the development of Perl 6, I said it was going to be a community design. I designed Perl, myself. It's limited by my own brain power. So I wanted Perl 6 to be a community design.

We can't be dictated to by radio. Radio needs to play what we send them.

Reality programming and social media make the game board bigger; they increase the number of runners on the track, each lunging at the finish line to be the first chest to hit the tape.

Once your computer is pretending to be a neural net, you get it to be able to do a particular task by just showing it a whole lot of examples.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

Our robots are signing up for online learning. After decades of attempts to program robots to perform complex tasks like flying helicopters or surgical suturing, the new approach is based on observing and recording the motions of human experts as they perform these feats.

I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.

Moira nodded vigorously. She didn't know what BASIC or COBOL were, except that Wiz said they caused brain damage in those who used them.

But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our day-to-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds. Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.

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 first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.

All race conditions, deadlock conditions, and concurrent update problems are due to mutable variables.

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

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. —Bjarne Stroustrup, 1991

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.