Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this," well, that would be enough immortality for me.
Aim for brevity while avoiding jargon.
Too few people recognize that the high technology so celebrated today is essentially a mathematical technology.
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."
The prisoner falls in love with his chains.
Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?
When building sand castles on the beach, we can ignore the waves but should watch the tide.
The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.
Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.
The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
Brainpower is by far our scarcest resource.
We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!
In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote "teamwork." For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of "team spirit." Very.
...Simplifications have had a much greater long-range scientific impact than individual feats of ingenuity. The opportunity for simplification is very encouraging, because in all examples that come to mind the simple and elegant systems tend to be easier and faster to design and get right, more efficient in execution, and much more reliable than the more contrived contraptions that have to be debugged into some degree of acceptability....Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
Don't compete with me: firstly, I have more experience, and secondly, I have chosen the weapons.
I don't need to waste my time with a computer just because I am a computer scientist.
When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.
It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.
Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.
Thank goodness we don't have only serious problems, but ridiculous ones as well.
Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor of four; probably it is worse.
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
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