Great, great idea for a post.
You obliquely referenced Programmers at Work. I just finished reading it, so here is my list of the best quotes from it:
Great, great idea for a post.
You obliquely referenced Programmers at Work. I just finished reading it, so here is my list of the best quotes from it:
âThe way it was implemented here is not the way it was implemented at places it worksâ
â coworker in the hallway.
My favorite quote as related to programming or development in general is by Moishe Lettvinâconveniently, taken from the same blog entry which led me to yours here some months ago.
âIf you have profound knowledge of the cloud of problems around programming, of the higher level problems youâre trying to solve, youâll do a better job programming. This is obvious, and explains why the best programs are always the ones programmers write for themselves, eg. emacs, Google, VisicIlc, etc. And it conversely explains why so many programs are so uninspired, too: if youâll never use the feature youâre writing, youâre not going to imbue it with brilliance, because the brilliance will never occur to you.â
Itâs not a bugâŚitâs a feature!!
All my favourites seem to have appeared including the âother 90% of the timeâ and the âIâll use regular expressionsâ quotes.
Instead Iâll try to paraphrase a line from Operating Systems Concepts by Peterson and Silberschatz (sp?). It discusses multiprogramming in computers. I hope I donât b@$+@^dize it too badly.
âMultiprogramming is like a lawyer. While the lawyer is waiting for papers to be drawn up for one case, he can be doing research for another or preparing for a court date. In this manner, a lawyer need never be idle. Idle lawyers tend to become politicians, so there is a certain social value to keeping them busyâ.
âIâm too stupid to run this programâ
Anonymous user
(who does not realize that the real fault lies in the developer)
It works on my computer!
My favourite, the one I have on a sticker on my monitor is: âAssumption is the mother of all f***upsâ. Source unknown.
âItâs not that Iâm surrounded by incompetence that bothers me, itâs that I fit in so well.â
âI have a rock garden. Last week three of them died.â
i found this quote somewhere:
âSome programmers just need to take a deep breath and write code that is a delicious salami sandwich, and not an extravagantly prepared four course meal that tastes like shit.â
-opeth
who could forget the Klingon quotes??
"A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!"
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/joke/klingon.htm
this is also a GREAT list (not many sourced):
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/proverbs.html
"Wexelblatâs Scheduling Algorithm:
Choose two:
* Good
* Fast
* Cheap
"
"Everybody Knows:
* If you don't understand it, you can't program it.
* If you didn't measure it, you didn't do it.
"
âIn order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.â
I donât know who said it, but I think itâs awesome
Iâd say the people Iâve always looked up to are the likes of Carmack, McConnell, Abrash, Knuth and Fowler.
Cheers!
âGiving up on Microsoftâ - Jeff Atwood.
âIf you donât want to be replaced by a computer, donât act like one.â
My site with general computer quotes. Although few are related to programming, there are a few gems in there.
âIn order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.â
Not my favourite, but in the same vein as the above quote:
âHe works at the department of redundancy departmentâ
The lary wall quote is interesting.
Iâve been learning Ruby lately and am just completely miserable with it.
Itâs kind of like a language for people who just want to play. It has all sorts of neat tricksâalternate ways to do things that look cute and are fun but obfuscate the hell out of the code.
Most are little changes for absolutely no reasonâŚ
Putting the if at the end, for no reason except that it might have suited some developers twisted sense of ascetics (x = 5 if x 5)
Replacing a string concatination with substution for the same reason. Sometimes it saves 1 character of typing, sometimes it costs 1, but since itâs different, itâs yet another alternate way to do something:
a="bill was " + location
can be replaced with
a=âbill was $(location)â
ooh, big advantage. Larry was rightâKeep the language features at a minimum, keep patterns. ALWAYS enforce use of parentheses for method calls, just follow the same pattern every time.
Being able to override operators makes me feel kind of ill, Not that itâs not âCuteâ but âCuteâ doesnât justify hiding a method call in a place that doesnât look like a method call. It really doesnât hurt anyone if you just use a method called âlookup()â or something instead of overriding []
The thing that really tore it is the lack of anything equivalent to âOption Explicitâ. I know lots of people that wouldnât hire anyone who didnât understand that âOption Explicitâ HAS to be the first line of every VB fileâand Ruby has no way to do this.
Everything in this language defies larry wallâs quote, and although Iâve never been a huge perl fan either, all of a sudden Iâm feeling a lot more respect for the man.
Saving a few keystrokes isnât generally a good thing unless you only have two fingers to type with.
âA developer writes an average of 6 lines of code per day for the entire project; think what you can do with 6 lines of Assembler and with 6 lines of a high level languageâ; anonymous (actually just donât remember). Changed my life.
âIn pursuit of the dubious goal of producing idiot-proof, zero-learning-curve programs, even programs intended for heavy-duty use such as editorsâarguably the most important piece of software youâll useâhave been turned into childrenâs toys, effectively expert-proofedâ â Tom Christiansen