Quotes About Programmers

Because we were so smart and we had so much experience. We had it wired. Couldn't miss. Programmers are optimistic. And we have to be because if we weren't optimists we couldn't do this work. Which is why we fall prey to things like second systems, why we can't schedule our projects, why this stuff is so hard.

one thing that separates good programmers from bad programmers is that good programmers are more facile at jumping between layers of abstraction—they can keep the layers distinct while making changes and choose the right layer to make changes in.

Seibel: When you're hiring programmers, how do you recognize the good ones? Crockford: The approach I've taken now is to do a code reading. I invite the candidate to bring in a piece of code he's really proud of and walk us through it.

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.

The fact that these measures are objective is reassuring to everyone. Objective and quantitative measure is highly respected by both programmers and businesspeople. The fact that these measures are usually ineffective in producing successful products tends to get lost in the shuffle.

When a machine manages to be simultaneously meaningful and surprising in the same rich way, it too compels a mentalistic interpretation. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, there are programmers who, in principle, have a mechanical interpretation. But even for them, that interpretation loses its grip as the working program fills its memory with details too voluminous for them to grasp.

but I'm going to need a team: an artist, a couple programmers, and a manager, because I don't want to sit there interfacing with management all day; I want to program.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.

It is a shame that homebrew development can't be officially sanctioned and supported, because it would be a wonderful platform for a modern generation of programmers to be able to get a real feel for low level design work, to be contrasted with the high level web and application work that so many entry level people start with.

When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.

Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers, coders, bug-fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently.

REALITY" IS THE TEMPORARY RESULTANT OF CONTINUOUS STRUGGLES BETWEEN RIVAL GANGS OF PROGRAMMERS.

Brook's Law: "Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.

if you want the most efficient production, you must give up trying to make programmers produce. Handle their subsistence, give them their heads, and forget about deadlines.

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.

Making AI more sensitive to the full scope of human thought is no simple task. The solutions are likely to require insights derived from fields beyond computer science, which means programmers will have to learn to collaborate more often with experts in other domains.

You're not dealing with people," Jerry told him. "These are programmers, boy. Programmers!

Real programmers are those that can sleep in front of terminals ... with their eyes opened.

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people.

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people.

Every system is built from a domain-specific language designed by the programmers to describe that system. Functions are the verbs of that language, and classes are the nouns.

The problem that Dijkstra recognized, early on, was that programming is hard, and that programmers don't do it very well.

it's confusing to have a controller and a manager and a driver in the same code base. What is the essential difference between a DeviceManager and a Protocol-Controller? Why are both not controllers or both not managers? Are they both Drivers really? The name leads you to expect two objects that have very different type as well as having different classes. A consistent lexicon is a great boon to the programmers who must use your code.