Quotes
Software development: the good parts.
50
11JavaScript is the only language that I'm aware of that people feel they don't need to learn before they start using it.
-- Douglas Crockford
Over half of the time you spend working on a project is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you.
-- Richard P. Gabriel
I have a simple rule in life: If I don't understand something, it must be bad.
-- Linus Torvalds
Debugging time increases as a square of the program’s size.
-- Chris Wenham
I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one.
-- David Parnas
🕑 Dec 17, 2024
Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
The problem is that coding isn’t fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can’t write the library yourself.
-- Donald Knuth
I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard.
-- Ken Thompson
One of the greatest joys in computer programming is discovering a new, faster, more efficient algorithm for doing something — particularly if a lot of well-respected people have come up with worse solutions.
-- Danny Hillis
The efficiency of the code decreases with an increase in the number of people working on the program. The most efficient programs are written by a single person.
-- Charles Simonyi
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.
-- Fred Brooks
Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.
-- Chris Sacca
If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.
-- David Leinweber
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
-- Eric S. Raymond
Communication must be stateless in nature, such that each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.
-- Roy Fielding
🕑 Feb 13, 2025
There are many terrible mistakes to make in program design, so go ahead and make them so that you understand them better.
-- Marijn Haverbeke
🕑 Feb 12, 2025
Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
-- Fred Brooks
🕑 Feb 11, 2025
A framework can provide 90% of the features we need quickly - giving us a false sense of confidence early in the development cycle - and then be frustratingly hard when it comes to implementing the last 10%.
-- Tony Parisi
🕑 Feb 10, 2025
Premature abstraction is as bad as premature optimization.
-- Luciano Ramalho
🕑 Feb 8, 2025
I've never been a lover of existing code. Code by itself almost rots and it’s gotta be rewritten. Even when nothing has changed, for some reason it rots.
-- Ken Thompson
🕑 Feb 7, 2025
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
-- Niklaus Wirth
🕑 Feb 6, 2025
The real problem with throwaway code comes when it isn't thrown away.
-- Joseph Yoder
🕑 Feb 5, 2025
Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it.
-- John McCarthy
🕑 Feb 4, 2025
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
-- Jeff Hammerbacher
🕑 Feb 3, 2025
Coding is "90 percent finished" for half of the total coding time. Debugging is "99 percent complete" most of the time.
-- Fred Brooks
🕑 Feb 2, 2025
In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.
-- Douglas Crockford
🕑 Feb 1, 2025
What is programming? Some people call it a science, some people call it an art, some people call it a skill. I think it has aspects of all three.
-- Charles Simonyi
🕑 Jan 31, 2025
A skilled programmer is like a poet who can put into words those ideas that others find inexpressible.
-- Danny Hillis
🕑 Jan 30, 2025
In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.
-- Butler Lampson
🕑 Jan 29, 2025
Be humble, communicate clearly, and respect others. It costs nothing to be kind, but the impact is priceless.
-- Addy Osmani
🕑 Jan 28, 2025
I’ve got this need to program. I wake up in the morning with sentences of a literate program. Before breakfast -- I’m sure poets must feel this -- I have to go to the computer and write this paragraph and then I can eat and I’m happy.
-- Donald Knuth
🕑 Jan 25, 2025
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
-- Linus Torvalds
🕑 Jan 24, 2025
No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess.
-- Robert C. Martin