The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment. --Theodore H. White A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points --Alan Kay You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have. --Cory Althoff The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines. --Steve McConnell Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard. --unknown 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 How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules? --Anonymous With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power. --Richard Stallman Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live --John Woods When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass. --Larry Wall
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