Quotes About Programming

Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

I can follow pretty much every programming language out there, I can make a two-hundred-year-old diary out of some really nasty ingredients, I can even make sense out of the instruction booklets that come with IKEA furniture, but I can*not* make heads or tails of this nonsense right here.

software development was insecurities all the way down. Even

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

SCCS is the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never checks out.

Your mind, however, remained the same. The memories and thought patterns within it that had been twisted and warped by years of darkness and sin were left perfectly intact. In other words, that brand-new spirit within you suddenly found itself trying to work with a mind that had been totally programmed by the world!

Readers need to understand programs in detail and in concept. Sometimes they move from detail to concept, sometimes from concept to detail.

The purposes of two constructors with different sets of parameters are not always obvious, but the name of the factory methods can suggest the reason clients might want to create an object each way.

Listening , Testing , Coding , Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something .

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

Given the choice between an extremely skilled loner and a competent-but-social programmer, XP teams consistently choose the more social candidate. The best interviewing technique is to have the candidate work with the team for a day. Pair programming provides an excellent test of technical and social skills.

Saying that programmers should just accomplish twice as much doesn't work. They can gain skills and effectiveness, but they cannot get more done on demand. More time at the desk does not equal increased productivity for creative work.

Rather than apply minutes of suspect reasoning, we can just ask the computer by making the change and running the tests.

Used Pluggable Adaptor, which we promise not to use again for four months, minimum, because it makes code hard to statically analyze.

You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.

What was amazing was that a large team of highly intelligent programmers could labor so hard and so long on such an unpromising project. You know, you shouldn't trust us intelligent programmers. We can think up such good arguments for convincing ourselves and each other of the utterly absurd. Especially don't believe us when we promise to repeat an earlier success, only bigger and better next time.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it. Our applications are complex because we are ambitious to use our computers in ever more sophisticated ways. Programming is complex because of the large number of conflicting objectives for each of our programming projects. If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, "oh, that's well written code." It's much like as if you were writing a poem.

the crucial step in programming is not the actual act of mechanically typing commands into a computer, but instead crafting the underlying solution that is then translated into code.

The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

They are programming people," Harris says. "There's always this narrative that technology's neutral. And it's up to us to choose how we use it. This is just not true—" "Technology is not neutral?" Cooper interrupts. "It's not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that's how they make their money.

Consider this quote from the coding prodigy Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to an interviewer: Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, "oh, that's well written code." It's much like as if you were writing a poem.

If you are working on a computer science programming assignment, schedule yourself to finish a week early so you can add a host of extra bells and whistles.