Good code is its own best documentation.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.
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.
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.
The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.
When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
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.
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.
Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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.
The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
In English every word can be verbed.
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