Best 24 quotes in «computer programming quotes» category

You don't have to believe everything you think.

BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.

An activity originally intended to be performed by low-status, clerical – and more often than not, female – computer programming was gradually and deliberately transformed into a high-status, scientific, and masculine discipline.

Computer hacking was like a chemical bond holding us all together.

If it is artificial intelligence we are trying to develop, then there is no need for concern, for no matter how smart an AI gets, it’ll still not be able to defy the programming of its creator, but if it is artificial sentience we want to develop, then we must rethink.

Higher-order functions allow us to abstract over actions, not just values.

If the discipline of requirements specification has taught us anything, it is that well-specified requirements are as formal as code and can act as executable tests of that code!

A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded--which was a major breakthrough in itself--the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net--that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine...Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net.

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

In the happy land of elegant code and pretty rainbows, there lives a spoil-sport monster called inefficiency.

In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be, or not to be, that is the question." In the 21st century, "to code, or not to code, that is the challenge.

In the end, it all comes down to 0 and 1

It has to become second nature, for a programmer, to notice when a concept is begging to be abstracted into a new word.

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it’s semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty

Pascal (Object Pascal - Free Pascal) for real programmers, Delphi for Nerds... C/C++ for people who always wishes to do things like reinventing the wheel.

The LSP makes clear that in OOD the ISA relationship pertains to behavior. Not intrinsic private behavior, but extrinsic public behavior; behavior that clients depend upon.

If you are too lazy to cleanup your database after testing, your filesystem after testing or your memory based system consider moving to a different profession. This isn't a job for you.

I’ve always had very strong feeling that computer programming is a godlike kind of job. Similar to the Lord creating our material world and whole the Universe, based on molecular techniques such as DNA coding ― developers create the digital world based on IT technologies coding.

People who aren't steeped in software often have an unrealistically non-horrified view of software quality.

Pretending to have sentience is not the same as having sentience.

We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells. A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform. A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.