Quotes About Code

As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.

In a globalized economy, where corporations are held to the almighty dollar and raising the stock price involves layoffs, overworked staffs, and offshoring, this strategy I've shown you of cutting developer costs is making good code obsolete. As developers, we're going to be asked/told/conned into writing twice the code in half the time if we're not careful.

There was a time, back in the sixties, when commenting-out code might have been useful. But we've had good source code control systems for a very long time now. Those systems will remember the code for us. We don't have to comment it out any more. Just delete the code. We won't lose it. Promise.

Making the code read like a top-down set of TO paragraphs is an effective technique for keeping the abstraction level consistent.

Remember that the people who read your code will be programmers.

You can't make a reusable framework until you first make a usable framework. Reusable frameworks require that you build them in concert with several reusing applications.

Truth can only be found in one place: the code.

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

Of course bad code can be cleaned up. But it's very expensive.

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.

Clean code is not written by following a set of rules. You don't become a software craftsman by learning a list of heuristics. Professionalism and craftsmanship come from values that drive disciplines.

Why do most developers fear to make continuous changes to their code? They are afraid they'll break it! Why are they afraid they'll break it? Because they don't have tests.

I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.

Don't Use a Comment When You Can Use a Function or a Variable

Perhaps you thought that "getting it working" was the first order of business for a professional developer. I hope by now, however, that this book has disabused you of that idea. The functionality that you create today has a good chance of changing in the next release, but the readability of your code will have a profound effect on all the changes that will ever be made.

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...Delta is for Charlie and Charlie is for Cain

Chris asks, What are you going to stick to? Mah guns, boy, mah guns, I tell him. That's the Code of the West.

In America, one of the advantages of investing in real estate over paper assets is this legal loophole in the tax code.

Ride with an outlaw, die with him, he added. I admit it's a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I'm sorry you crossed the line, though. Jake's momentary optimism had passed, and he felt tired and despairing. He would have liked a good bed in a whorehouse and a nice night's sleep. I never seen no line, Gus, he said. I was just trying to get to Kansas without getting scalped.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense.

It doesn't matter how smart you are, Enigma is always smarter.

It's not rocket science. Hong Kong has 95% tax compliance, because it's code is only 4 pages long with a 15% flat tax.

Meaning comes from the correspondence between the code and its execution, and the compact underlying structure of the world and its dynamics.