Quotes About Programming

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

I'm programmed to help humans." Eyebrow lift again. "You're not programmed to watch media." She had a point.

machine-readable code written into human DNA

Code that communicates its purpose is very important. I often refactor just when I'm reading some code. That way as I gain understanding about the program, I embed that understanding into the code for later so I don't forget what I learned.

If oy have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it's doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the "what".

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

A heuristic we follow is that whenever we feel the need to comment something, we write a method instead.

When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

It's more than a little ironic that many of us preach safety first to our children, nieces, and nephews but in our roles as programmers scream for freedom, a hybrid of the Wild West gunslinger and teenage driver. Give us freedom, give us the resources, and watch us fly.

It reminds me of a statement Kent Beck often makes about himself: "I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits." Refactoring helps me be much more effective at writing robust code.

A statement Kent Beck often makes about himself, "I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Every reader of your program should understand what your functions compute without having to read the function itself. A multi-function program should also come with a purpose statement. Indeed, good programmers write two purpose statements: one for the reader who may have to modify the code and another one for the person who wishes to use the program but not read it.

The Substitution Principle tells us that wherever a value of one type is expected, one may provide a value of any subtype of that type:

As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

Reflecting on real-life machine morality, the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted as long ago as 1960 that "we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire."18

Eight hundred forty-three television stations, and there didn't appear to be much more worth watching than when we lived in the black-and-white wasteland of channels two through thirteen.

code is prioritized above human interactions.

The problems are hidden inside code and data, which makes them harder to see and easier to ignore.

development at leading-edge software organizations, like JavaSoft, Microsoft, and Netscape. He called to chat with a

Yet his experiments led him to a contradictory conclusion. Programming did not teach people how to think—he realized he knew too many narrow-minded programmers for that to be so, now that he considered the question in depth. The truth was the converse: Every individual's ingrained way of thinking affected how he or she programmed.