Quotes About Coding

Consider, for example, the truly hideous practice of creating a variable named klass just because the name class was used for something else.

OO imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control.

is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

Cuteness in code often appears in the form of colloquialisms or slang. For example, don't use the name whack() to mean kill(). Don't tell little culture-dependent jokes like eatMyShorts() to mean abort(). Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

Duplication and expressiveness take me a very long way into what I consider clean code, and improving dirty code with just these two things in mind can make a huge difference. There is, however, one other thing that I'm aware of doing, which is a bit harder to explain.

Implementation Patterns.

You should choose a set of simple rules that govern the format of your code, and then you should consistently apply those rules. If you are working on a team, then the team should agree to a single set of formatting rules and all members should comply.

Duplication may be the root of all evil in software. Many principles and practices have been created for the purpose of controlling or eliminating it.

That's being attentive to every variable name. You should name a variable using the same care with which you name a first-born child.

Il campo @author di un Javadoc ci dice chi siamo. Siamo gli autori. E una caratteristica degli autori è che hanno dei lettori. In effetti, è responsabilità degli autori riuscire a comunicare bene coi loro lettori. La prossima volta che scriverete una riga di codice, ricordatevi che voi ne siete gli autori, e che scrivete a dei lettori che vi giudicheranno per quello che avrete scritto.

software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure.

I used to think 2000 lines was a big program. After all, it was a full box of cards that weighed 10 pounds. Now, however, a program isn't really big until it exceeds 100,000 lines.

Master programmers think of systems as stories to be told rather than programs to be written.

Paradigms are ways of programming, relatively unrelated to languages. A paradigm tells you which programming structures to use, and when to use them. To date, there have been three such paradigms. For reasons we shall discuss later, there are unlikely to be any others.

Functional programming imposes discipline upon assignment.

Each of the paradigms removes capabilities from the programmer. None of them adds new capabilities. Each imposes some kind of extra discipline that is negative in its intent. The paradigms tell us what not to do, more than they tell us what to do.

Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer's first order of business.

So if you want to go fast, if you want to get done quickly, if you want your code to be easy to write, make it easy to read.

It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

Consider this: the human genome codes for about 1,500 different TFs, contains 4,000,000 TF-binding sites, and the average cell uses about 200,000 such sites to generate its distinctive gene-expression profile.5 This is boggling.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

A couple of years ago, I ran into someone at a trade show who was representing the NSA (National Security Agency). He mentioned to someone else in passing that he'd written a filter program in Perl, so without telling him who I was, I asked him if I could tell people that the NSA uses Perl. His response was, Doesn't everyone? So now I don't tell people the NSA uses Perl. I merely tell people the NSA thinks everyone uses Perl. They should know, after all.

Coding is today's language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead consumers of computer science.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.