Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
...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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.
--Benjamin H Bratton
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.
--Rick Cook
One knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
--Brian Kernighan
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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