Programming Quotes (source: http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/)

October 31, 2020 · View on GitHub

  • Q: What is the difference between an object methodologist and a terrorist?
  • A: You can negotiate with the terrorist.

When you want to do something differently from the rest of the world, it’s a good idea to look into whether the rest of the world knows something you don’t.

These are some of the types of problems engineers at REAL software shops have to solve to be able to ship REAL product for REAL money. If you haven’t HAD to produce code like this yourself at some point in your carrier then you’ve lived a sheltered life.

Its disingenuous for you to get on your ivory tower to point and laugh.

The beauty of small and simple code is that you can bend or break the rules as long it stays small and simple. Rules allow people to write code without thinking. [And when] you dont think […] you get bloated code that just concatenates stupid patterns.

  • uriel: When I read “OMG (Object Management Group)” I think “Oh My God!”.
  • gobongo: Fitting because whenever someone suggests I use UML I think “Oh My God (is this guy on crack?)!”.
From: ron minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
Subject: [9fans] microkernels

are they the O-O of the OS world? Always the promises ...

ron

> What's wrong with perl?

It combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different
sublanguages in one monolithic executable.  It combines the power of
C with the readability of PostScript.

> To me perl is the triumph of utalitarianism.

So are cockroaches.  So is `sendmail'.

— jwz [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=33F4D777.7BF84EA3%40netscape.com]

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.

There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match

Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

Every language has an optimization operator. In C++ that operator is ‘//’

A Professor of Computer Science gave a paper on how he uses Linux to teach his undergraduates about operating systems. Someone in the audience asked why use Linux rather than Plan 9?' and the professor answered:Plan 9 looks like it was written by experts; Linux looks like something my students could aspire to write'.

Computer: Your nominators and endorsers for the Kanai Award consistently characterized your work as simple yet powerful. How do you discover such powerful abstractions? 

 Vacuumware: n, software which was written specifically to fill a void in
 the industry, especially software which is successful more due to how well
 it fills that void than due to anything else, like usability or utility.

I believe it may have been Dennis Ritchie who said (about X) “Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.” X is a prime example of vacuumware, and in fact inspired the term.

[http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US8/PLAY/inklish.html]

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

{Ex-Cyber} some part of me desperately wants to believe that XML-RPC is some kind of elaborate joke, like a cross between Discordianism and IP Over Avian Carriers

[Like programmers] prostitutes also think they all suck.