Quotes About Coding

I already knew that I wanted to be involved in something that combined management and coding, so I wasn't coding all the time. And I don't want to be in a management position, where that's all I'm doing, and I'm not able to participate in the creation of the technology.

But in the meantime there's no reason to starve the users for [syntactic] sugar. It doesn't rot their teeth and it helps them avoid mistakes. — Brendan Eich

Assembly level programming] kind of still separates the chest hair—gender-independent—programmers from those who don't quite have it. — Brendan Eich

I think it's not an accident that we often use the imagery of magic to describe programming. We speak of computing wizards and we think of things happening by magic or automagically. And I think that's because being able to get a machine to do what you want is the closest thing we've got in technology to adolescent wish-fulfillment.

Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp.

Then there's a third thing, which may seem like a small thing but I don't think it is. Which is that in an infix world, every operator is next to both of its operands. In a prefix world it isn't. You have to do more work to see the other operand.

When I wrote Volume I of The Art of Computer Programming people didn't realize that they could use linked lists in their own programs, that they could use pointers for data structures.

Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way. It's all just pattern.

It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way. It's all just pattern.

Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.

I've known entrepreneurs who were not great salespeople, or didn't know how to code, or were not particularly charismatic leaders. But I don't know of any entrepreneurs who have achieved any level of success without persistence and determination.

All software sucks.

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.

In software, it's easy to understand what people want, and it's hard to build. Internet stuff is super easy to build, but it's hard to know what people want.

Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.

premature optimization is the root of all evil. —Donald E. Knuth [

When used to best advantage, exceptions can improve a program's readability, reliability, and maintainability. When used improperly, they can have the opposite effect.

Let us reflect on the brief life of a bit

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

The Only Thing More Expensive Than Writing Software Is Writing Bad Software

I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.