Best 218 quotes in «programming quotes» category

Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

We are programmed; we are literally programmed genetically and then we are programmed environmentally and most people never break out of that programming.

We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.

When in doubt, leave it out.

We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.

We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.

Would you rather Test-First, or Debug-Later ?

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

Also, look for “floating alters.” These are not deliberately created parts of the system, but alters that were accidentally split off at the same time as others.

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.

Also, don't forget that some of the most successful people in the world are self-taught programmers. Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple, is a self-taught programmer. So is Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on NASA's Apollo Moon missions; David Karp, founder of Tumblr; Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter; and Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram.

A code is like love, it has created with clear intentions at the beginning, but it can get complicated.

And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.

As Lynn writes: "What angers me is the loss of control. At any moment someone could come to me, be dressed the right way and use the right code, and I no longer have free will. I will do anything that person requests. I hate them for that. Nothing else is as bad as known that I am always out of control; knowing that I am still a laboratory experiment, a puppet whose strings are hidden from ever but my handlers, and I don't yet know how to break free. p216

Artificial intelligence is nowhere near attaining actual sentience or awareness. And without awareness it’s simply a mechanical device, which may pretend to show emotions and sentience, if it is programmed to do so, and thus it may be able to fool the humans as being alive, but in its own internal circuitry, it’d simply be following its preprogrammed tasks through the flowchart of an algorithm.

How can we make sure we wind up behind the right door when the going gets tough? The answer is: craftsmanship.

As soon as he said it was okay to do engineering, that really freed me up. My psychological block was really that I didn't want to start a company. Because I was just afraid. In business and politics, I wasn't going to be a real strong participant. I wasn't going to tell other people how to do things. I wasn't going to run things ever in my life. I was a non-political person and I was a very non-forceful person. It dated back to a lot of things that happened during the Vietnam War. But I just couldn't run a company.

Being able to extend jQuery, whether by adding your own functions, CSS selectors or full- blown plugins, makes you a much stronger and smarter developer.

Every programmer is an author.

First solve the problem. Then, write the code.

Happiness should be a function without any parameters.

Have you ever had a weird and strong feeling that programming is a godlike kind of work? Just as the Lord created our world and the entire Universe based on molecular techniques such as DNA coding, software developers create a digital world based on IT coding.

How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever, In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things. Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

Beware of "don'ts", "thou shalt" and the like. These are signals of programming attempts at your brain.

Big Brother fills us all with the same crap. My guess is he was clever the same way everybody thinks they're clever. I tell her to type in 'password

Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge.

Coding like poetry should be short and concise.

Health and programming should go together like a horse and carriage. You can't have one without the other. In our sedentary office work, we often forget that an absence of health is as bad as a lack of programming skills.

If the input string is not in the format, change the program, not the character

If someone can change your mind, he has won you over without raising his hand against you. This is the future of warfare.

I later became more interested in equal rights for women in the work place because of what was happening at IBM. One of the women at Remington Rand had previously been a system service girl for IBM during the war. After a system was installed, a system service girl would go out and show the users how it worked. She was the liaison between the users and the computer company. She was married and had been fired to make room for a returning veteran. When the war ended, IBM rehired all of its former employees who had left to join the military, then fired all of the married women with jobs that could be filled by men.

If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.

if you can write "hello world" you can change the world

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.

In languages with a garbage collector (GC), the GC keeps track and cleans up memory that isn’t being used anymore, and we don’t need to think about it. Without a GC, it’s our responsibility to identify when memory is no longer being used and call code to explicitly return it, just as we did to request it. Doing this correctly has historically been a difficult programming problem. If we forget, we’ll waste memory. If we do it too early, we’ll have an invalid variable. If we do it twice, that’s a bug too. We need to pair exactly one allocate with exactly one free. Rust takes a different path: the memory is automatically returned once the variable that owns it goes out of scope.

...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.

Inheritance has recently fallen out of favor as a programming design solution in many programming languages because it’s often at risk of sharing more code than necessary. Subclasses shouldn’t always share all characteristics of their parent class but will do so with inheritance. This can make a program’s design less flexible. It also introduces the possibility of calling methods on subclasses that don’t make sense or that cause errors because the methods don’t apply to the subclass. In addition, some languages will only allow a subclass to inherit from one class, further restricting the flexibility of a program’s design. For these reasons, Rust takes a different approach, using trait objects instead of inheritance.

Is your life story the truth? Yes, the chronological events are true. Is it the whole truth? No, you see and judge it through your conditioned eyes and mind - not of all involved - nor do you see the entire overview. Is it nothing but the truth? No, you select, share, delete, distort, subtract, assume and add what you want, need and choose to.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.

It has all the right ingredients: rich contents, friendly, personal language, subtle humor, the right references, and a plethora of pointers to resources.