Quotes on programming
The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.
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J. Osterhout Quotes
Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes.
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Harlan Mills Quotes
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.
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Richard Pattis Quotes
One man's constant is another man's variable.
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Alan J. Perlis Quotes
We don't manage our time as well as we manage our space. There's an overhead of starting and an overhead of stopping a project because you kind of lose your momentum. And you've got to bracket and put aside all the things you're already doing. So you need reasonably large blocks of uninterrupted time if you're going to be successful at doing some of these things. That's why hackers tend to stay up late. If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.
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Bill Joy Quotes
Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?"
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Steve McConnell Quotes
Don't argue with people who write with digital ink and pay by the kilowatt-hour.
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Don Rittner Quotes
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
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Stan Kelly-Bootle Quotes
Programs for sale: fast, reliable, cheap - choose two.
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Author Unknown Quotes
When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot speak English.
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Author Unknown Quotes
It's okay to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
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Steve McConnell Quotes
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
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Author Unknown Quotes
Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.
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Author Unknown Quotes
What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself.
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Douglas Adams Quotes
It's the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.
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Andy Hertzfeld Quotes
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.
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Author Unknown Quotes
Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only two sizes: too big and too small.
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Richard Pattis Quotes
All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists.
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Frederick Brooks Quotes
Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations. They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them "operators" or "programmers."
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Peter F. Drucker Quotes
It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature.
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Author Unknown Quotes
Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work."
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Author Unknown Quotes
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
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Unknown Author Quotes
He who hasn't hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does so as an adult has no brain.
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John Moore Quotes
When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. Compound bugs are two separate bugs that interact: you trip going downstairs, and when you reach for the handrail it comes off in your hand.
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Paul Graham Quotes
Ready, fire, aim: the fast approach to software development. Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim: the slow approach to software development.
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Author Unknown Quotes
Version 1 of any software is full of bugs. Version 2 fixes all the bugs and is great. Version 3 adds all the things users ask for, but hides all the great stuff in Version 2.
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Fred Blechman Quotes
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
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Martin Fowler Quotes
You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.
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C.A.R. Hoare Quotes
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
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C.A.R. Hoare Quotes
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
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Alan J. Perlis Quotes
And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
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Bill Bryson Quotes
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
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Brian Kernighan Quotes
From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.
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Peter Williams Quotes