Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning. --Isaac Traxler Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively --Dalai Lama XIV College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility. --Dennis Miller It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good. --Hary Chapin 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 The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language. --Alan Kay A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. --Unix Fortune ...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 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 So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack --Kernighan Brian 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. Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. --Edsger W. Dijkstra 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 The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines. --Steve McConnell What is a university/college when the students lose interest? --Isaac Traxler Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. --Louis Srygley How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules? --Anonymous 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 The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why. --perldoc perl Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live --John Woods People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware --Alan Kay Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree. --Professor W. 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 The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly. --Joe Armstrong Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail. --Max Kanat-Alexander There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge. --Jon Erickson Think twice, code once. --Waseem Latif Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist --Pablo Picasso
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