College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility. --Dennis Miller 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 Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. --Martin Fowler Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live --John Woods 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 Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. --Alan Kay Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning. --Isaac Traxler 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 First solve the problem. Then, write the code. --Waseem Latif I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it. --Robert C. Martin If the steps become to big, they become walls... --Herb Sutter Happiness should be a function without any parameters. --Pranshu Midha [On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong. --Ken Thompson That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. --Larry Niven 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 Premature optimization is the root of all evil. --Donald Knuth Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard. --unknown 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 Think twice, code once. --Waseem Latif Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree. --Professor W. 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 The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language. --Alan Kay Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. --Louis Srygley Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist --Pablo Picasso 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 When in doubt, do something. --Harry Chapin I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits. --Kent Beck Good programmers write code that humans can understand. --Martin Fowler Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. --Nartin Fowler 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 Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life. --Prince Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship. --David Thomas
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