[CTS] Programming....Quotes
- From: "Surfin Suzy" <surfin_suzy@xxxxxxx>
- To: "CTS" <computertalkshop@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 01:08:32 -0600
Programming Quotes
*UNIX is simple. But It just needs a genius to understand its
simplicity.
--Dennis Ritchie
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad
judgement.
--Fred Brooks
Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is
when something works, but you don't know why it works. Programmers
combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.
It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for
it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.
-Steve McConnell Code Complete
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then
the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
-Gerald Weinberg
The Six Phases of a Project:
Enthusiasm
Disillusionment
Panic
Search for the Guilty
Punishment of the Innocent
Praise for non-participants
Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a
comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this
comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make
it even clearer.
--Steve McConnell Code Complete
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
intelligent are full of doubt.
--Bertrand Russell
No matter how slick(efficient) the demo is in rehearsal, when you do
it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless
presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people
watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.
One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
their C programs.
--Robert Firth
Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?
--Richard A. O'Keefe
C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be
the process of putting them in.
--Edsger Dijkstra
You can either have software quality or you can have pointer
arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.
--(Bertrand Meyer)
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.
--Alan J. Perlis
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring
aircraft building progress by weight.
--Bill Gates
Before software can be reusable, it first has to be usable.
--Ralph Johnson
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the
development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other
90% of the development time.
--Tom Cargill
Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and
better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create
bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.
--Anon
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had
to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized
that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in
finding mistakes in my own programs.
--Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949
I did say something along the lines of "C makes it easy to shoot
yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows
your whole leg off."
--Bjarne Stroustrup
It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of
giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been
said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on
the toes of other midgets.
--Alan Cooper About Face
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
--Pablo Picasso
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
--attributed to Norm Schryer
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit
there.
--Will Rogers
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature,
because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the
software engineer.
--Fred Brooks, Jr.
As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's
experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still
feel that way.
--Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability --Edsger W.Dijkstra
I've finally learned what "upward compatible" means. It means we get
to keep all our old mistakes.
--Dennie van Tassel
(P.S: just like revision changes for hardware or new version release
for software)
Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don't do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
--M.A. Jackson
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with
millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural
integrity, but
just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
--Alan Kay
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was
written, and another for which it wasn't.
--Alan J. Perlis
Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand
what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.
--Putt's Law
Copy and paste is a design error
--David Parnas
Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months
might as well have been written by someone else.
--Eagleson's law
The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of
the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user.
Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong.
--Verity Stob*
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