Programming Quotes - Page 13

• The Internet is corporations all the way down.

  Ethan Zuckerman

  Corporations, Way, Internet

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• XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

  Charles Simonyi

  Napkins, Language, Computer

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• A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Security Systems, Secret, Pseudo

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.46, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Hands, Lasts, Program

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.26, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Release, Customers

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.29, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

  Brian Kernighan

  Tools, Debugging, Print

  "Unix for Beginners". Paper by Brian Kernighan, 1979.

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• In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Success, Business, Military

  Quoted in Richard Nixon, Six Crises (1962)

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• In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.

  John Carmack

  Dedication, Self, Rivers

  "Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture". Book by David Kushner, May 6, 2003.

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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 cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

  Gordon Bell

  Engineering, Software, Simplicity In Design

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• It is my firm belief that all successful languages are grown and not merely designed from first principles

  Bjarne Stroustrup

  Learning, Successful, Principles

  Bjarne Stroustrup (1994). “The Design and Evolution of C++”, Addison-Wesley Professional

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• Fancy algorithms are slow when N is small, and N is usually small.

  Rob Pike

  Learning, Algorithms, Fancy

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• Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

  Henry Spencer

  Roman Numerals, Roots, Squares

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• Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Mail, Program, Replaced

  "Law of Software Envelopment",

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• In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work.

  Robert Fano

  Learning, Thinking, People

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• In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

  Maimonides

  Learning, Simple, Simplify

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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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• Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it [indenting] part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented.

  Guido van Rossum

  Hate, Learning, Guarantees That

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• The proof of a high education is the ability to speak about complex matters as simply as possible.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Learning, Matter, Speak

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• Obviously with the onset of cable and satellite, there are more opportunities for programming and original programming, so it creates more opportunities for actors and producers and directors and everything.

  Anthony Michael Hall

  Opportunity, Directors, Actors

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• Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

  Brian Kernighan

  Sorry, Learning, Mind

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• When certain concepts of TeX are introduced informally, general rules will be stated; afterwards you will find that the rules aren't strictly true. In general, the later chapters contain more reliable information than the earlier ones do. The author feels that this technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. Once you understand a simple but false rule, it will not be hard to supplement that rule with its exceptions.

  Donald Knuth

  Lying, Learning, Simple

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• With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.

  Miguel de Icaza

  Language, Programming Languages, Available

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• We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.

  Rowan Atkinson

  Years, Challenges, Important

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• In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences.

  Tony Hoare

  Powerful, Real, Learning

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