Programmers Quotes - Page 10

• Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.

  Joel Spolsky

  Numbers, Three, Patterns

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• Even for the very best programmers ah, sometimes you'll see someone else's program or somebody will come along and they'll show you what can be done in a simpler way.

  Bill Gates

  Done, Way, Sometimes

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• Programmers can be lazy.

  Larry Wall

  Lazy

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• The whole HTML validation exercise is questionable, but validating as XHTML is flat-out masochism. Only recommended for those that enjoy pain. Or programmers. I can’t always tell the difference.

  Jeff Atwood

  Pain, Exercise, Differences

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• The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong.

  Verity Stob

  Errors, Mind, Lap

  "Catch as Catch Can". www.theregister.co.uk. January 11, 2006.

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• As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.

  Douglas McIlroy

  Jobs, Today, Tomorrow

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• In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Book, Writing, Numbers

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• I've always written. I'm from an older generation of programmers [who] did not come out of engineering. [A]ll sorts of people were drawn in from the social sciences and humanities.

  Ellen Ullman

  Engineering, People, Humanity

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• The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

  Ellen Ullman

  Program, Messiness

  Ellen Ullman (2012). “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents”, p.24, Pushkin Press

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• John Carmack, who has become interested in focusing on things other than game development at id, has resigned from the studio. John’s work on id Tech 5 and the technology for the current development work at id is complete, and his departure will not affect any current projects. We are fortunate to have a brilliant group of programmers at id who worked with John and will carry on id’s tradition of making great games with cutting-edge technology. As colleagues of John for many years, we wish him well.

  Tim Willits

  Cutting, Technology, Years

  "Doom Creator John Carmack Officially Leaves id Software". Interview with Mitch Dyer, www.ign.com. November 22, 2013.

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• Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

  Donald Knuth

  Strong, Opportunity, Thinking

  "Computer Programming as an Art". Communications of the ACM, Volume 17, Issue 12, December 1974.

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• Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am it's because they were up all night.

  Tom Van Vleck

  Real, Night, Ifs

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• I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

  Yukihiro Matsumoto

  Purpose, Rubies, World

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• Man is programmed to find the programmer.

  Kedar Joshi

  God, Men, Universe

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• I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."

  Michael Loceff

  Opposites, People, Watches

  "The Worst Day Ever". Interview with James Surowiecki, www.slate.com. January 17, 2006.

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• The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you're lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it's at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you're in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.

  Steve Jobs

  Boys, Differences, Average

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• Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.

  Jamais Cascio

  Should Have, Environmental, Degrees

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• Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

  Temple Grandin

  Kids, Skills, Autism

  Source: www.kshb.com

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• In their work, designers often become expert with the device they are designing. Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device. [...] Professional designers are usually aware of the pitfalls. But most design is not done by professional designers, it is done by engineers, programmers, and managers.

  Donald A. Norman

  Design, Trying, Pitfalls

  "The Design of Everyday Things". Book by Don Norman, ch. 6, 1988.

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• The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture

  Fred Brooks

  Data, Organization, Design

  "Architecture of the IBM System". IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 8, 1964.

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• The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.

  Fred Brooks

  Data, Battle, Weapons

  "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction". Book by Steve C. McConnell, 1993.

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• I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.

  Erik Naggum

  Believe, Should Have, Brain

  Re: Checking for Errors Before Run Time (Usenet article), groups.google.com. November 21, 2001.

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• The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

  John Carmack

  Games, Design, Suffering

  "John Carmack discusses RAGE on iPhone/iPad/iPod" by John Carmack, www.bethblog.com. October 26, 2010.

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• By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

  Donald Knuth

  Reality, Understanding, Use

  Donald E. Knuth (1997). “The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms”, p.12, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• By trade, I am a software programmer, so I never really had any experience with movies before. I started out with 'Paranormal Activity.

  Oren Peli

  Paranormal, Software, Trade

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