Quotes About Programming

Humans don't have programming." "Yes you do. You have too much of it. Conflicting programs, none of it interfacing properly, all calling different functions at the same time—or the same function for contradictory reasons. Yet you ignore it sometimes. That is not a flaw. It is what makes you you.

Humans don't have programming." "Yes you do. You have too much of it. Conflicting programs, none of it interfacing properly, all calling different functions at the same time—or the same function for contradictory reasons. Yet you ignore it sometimes. That is not a flaw. It is what makes you you." I

I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society.

The Startup Act should give all Americans, not just immigrants, a better shot at being tomorrow's engineers and entrepreneurs. And that opportunity could begin at a young age with education in computer programming.

Growing up as a young kid, I was in a restaurant. So, you know, I always had a very good understanding of the nuances. And in a way, that was a bad thing. Because it kind of programmed me to believe that if you're going have a restaurant, this is what you need to do, and this is the way it's going to be run.

My first app was released in July or August of 2008. It was a 'fingermill' - a treadmill for your fingers. My level of programming was quite basic to begin with, so it was more gimmicky to start with. Day one it was up there, I had 79 pounds worth of revenue.

You know how trends go with television. Next year, the networks might not be open to taking risks.

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.

Sure, what should I watch?" he asked. There hadn't been anything on television for months. Every station, save those used by the government, were off the air.

It's okay to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?"

the road to programming hell is paved with global variables

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

once gotos are introduced, they spread through the code like termites through a rotting house.

Copy and paste is a design error

complicated code is a sign that you don't understand your program well enough to make it simple.

You can do anything with stacks and iteration that you can do with recursion.

Don't differentiate routine names solely by number. One developer wrote all his code in one big function. Then he took every 15 lines and created functions named Part1, Part2, and so on. After that, he created one high-level function that called each part.

One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you'd like an error to be noticeable—you'd rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you'd rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully.

developers insert an average of 1 to 3 defects per hour into their designs and 5 to 8 defects per hour into code

The goal is to minimize the amount of a program you have to think about at any one time. You might think of this as mental juggling—the more mental balls the program requires you to keep in the air at once, the more likely you'll drop one of the balls, leading to a design or coding error.

Reduce complexity. The single most important reason to create a routine is to reduce a program's complexity. Create a routine to hide information so that you won't need to think about it.

few people can understand more than three levels of nested ifs

The BBC does a sterling job, but I'd like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying.