Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a list of religious issues: ■ Programming language ■ Indentation style ■ Placing of braces ■ Choice of IDE ■ Commenting style ■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs ■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary delivery ■ Programming utilities ■ Naming conventions ■ Use of gotos ■ Use of global variables ■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day --Steve McConnell Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. --Alan Kay ...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it. --Robert Nystrom Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. --Edward V. Berard Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard. --unknown Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. --Frederick P. Brooks Jr. A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points --Alan Kay Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. --Edsger W. Dijkstra That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. --Larry Niven How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules? --Anonymous Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning. --Isaac Traxler 'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability. --George Bernard Shaw Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live --John Woods The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user. --C.A.R. Hoare The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming. --Audrey Watters Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. --Keith Bostic Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them. --Joshua Bloch The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why. --perldoc perl What is a university/college when the students lose interest? --Isaac Traxler
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