Programming Languages Quotes - Page 7

• Good code is its own best documentation.

  Steve McConnell

  Technology, Documentation, Computer

  Steve McConnell (2004). “Code Complete”, p.817, Pearson Education

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• The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Witty, Humorous, Teaching

  "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" by Edsger Dijkstra, June 18, 1975.

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• Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

  Hal Abelson

  Trust, Technology, People

  "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson, (Preface to the first edition), 1979.

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• One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

  John Dewey

  Education, Teacher, Learning

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• An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

  John W. Gardner

  Education, Teacher, Philosopher

  Dr. John W. Gardner (2015). “Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?”, p.97, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.

  Niels Bohr

  Education, Teacher, Learning

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• When the words are fuzzy, the programmers reflexively retreat to the most precise method of articulation available: source code. Although there is nothing more precise than code, there is also nothing more permanent or resistant to change. So the situation frequently crops up where nomenclature confusion drives programmers to begin coding prematurely, and that code becomes the de facto design, regardless of its appropriateness or correctness.

  Amari Cooper

  Learning, Confusion, Design

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• I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

  Maurice Wilkes

  Mistake, Coders, Debugging

  Lecture titled "The Design and Use of the EDSAC" delivered by Maurice Wilkes at the Digital Computer Museum, tcm.computerhistory.org. September 23, 1979.

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• The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

  Seymour Cray

  Technology, Too Late, Coders

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• As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

  Maurice Wilkes

  Mistake, Technology, Coders

  "The Design and Use of the EDSAC". Lecture delivered at the Digital Computer Museum, September 23, 1979.

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• A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

  Dennis Ritchie

  Simplicity, Language, Computer

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• C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Quirky, Computer, Programming

  "Inventing Unix". Interview with Samuel K. Moore, Steven Cherry, spectrum.ieee.org. May 27, 2011.

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• That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.

  George Boole

  Learning, Expression, Language

  George Boole (1854). “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: On which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities”, p.24

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• Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

  Philip Greenspun

  Half, Bugs, Common

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• Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

  Tom Van Vleck

  Real, Writing, Should

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• Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

  Niklaus Wirth

  People, Causes, Admiration

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• Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

  David Gelernter

  Design, Defense, Complexity

  David Hillel Gelernter (1998). “Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

  Tony Hoare

  Simplicity, Reliability, Programming

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• As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

  David Parnas

  Real, Learning, Insomnia

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• When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Beauty, Creativity, Thinking

  "The Universal Book of Mathematics". Book by David Darling, p. 34, November 8, 2004.

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• Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

  Fred Brooks

  Thinking, Perfection, Requirements

  "The Mythical Man-Month". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.

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• For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that 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.

  Bill Bryson

  Stupid, Smart, Technology

  "Notes from a Big Country" / "I'm a Stranger Here Myself", Book by Bill Bryson, 1998.

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• The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

  Henry Petroski

  Technology, Achievement, Gains

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• Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

  Brian Kernighan

  Technology, Essence, Simplicity

  Brian W. Kernighan (1981). “Software Tools in Pascal”, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• In English every word can be verbed.

  Alan Perlis

  Language, English Language

  "Epigrams on Programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), pp. 7-13, pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de. September 1982.

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