Best 218 quotes in «programming quotes» category

As Mr. Nagle so competently points out, almost no one uses Eiffel; in fact until recently there were only 9 users. But now a 10th person just started, so we are holding a conference, appropriately titled the TENTH Eiffel USER conference, to celebrate.

Bugs lurk in corners and congregate at boundaries.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.

Copy and paste is a design error.

C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate.

Development is maintenance.

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

Ether is the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. One thing we are sure of and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminferous ether.

Every big computing disaster has come from taking too many ideas and putting them in one place.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples.

Experience doesn't necessarily teach anything.

BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

Go isn't functional, it's pragmatical. Why pure paradigms like FP or OOP are always a must? (sigh)

Go is no Erlang, Smalltalk or Scheme, nothing pure. But it works great and is fun!

Fancy algorithms are slow when N is small, and N is usually small.

Fancy optimizers have fancy bugs.

For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.

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.

Good code is its own best documentation.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

If they can shut down ABC News and ABC network programming just because they don't agree on something, it makes you wonder

Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

I don't like programming. It's tedious.

If you don’t take responsibility for programming yourself, then someone else will.

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.

I guess some of today's programming has rubbed off on me because I find myself having to set time around for touring, putting that together and then setting time around for recording.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

In programming, it’s often the buts in the specification that kill you.

Instructional programming is really great. To me, it's very enjoyable to watch a process.

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Good software, like wine, takes time.

Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.

I skip through the programming to watch the commercials.

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

In network theory, the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.