The beginning of wisdom
is to call things by their right names.
—Chinese proverb
Designers are from Mars;
developers are from Venus.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster
than any other invention
with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
—Mitch Ratcliffe
OO makes code understandable by encapsulating moving parts;
FP makes code understandable by minimizing moving parts.
—Michael Feathers
For me, coding is a form of self-expression.
—Justin Frankel, Nullsoft’s founder
Your code is how you express value,
but your real business is your data.
—Peter van Hardenberg, founding dev of heroku postgres
Less than 10% of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system;
the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure maintenance, and other housekeeping.
—Mary Shaw
These days we do not program software module-by-module;
we program software feature-by-feature.
—Mary Poppendieck, user stories
The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic,
some sensational method or tool whose application promises to render software development trivial.
It is the mark of the professional software engineer to know that no such panacea exists.
—Grady Booch, Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
—Richard Hamming, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers
The hardest things about running and managing a company
is tracking what people are working on.
—Joe Spolsky, creator of Trello
The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
—Frederick P. Brooks (1931–)
In programming, the hard part isn't solving problems,
but deciding what problems to solve.
—Paul Graham
Constraints are not limitations; they are insight.
—Steve Sanderson
The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague,
but to create a new semantic level
in which one can be absolutely precise.
—Edsger Dijkstra
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction
is one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
—Edsger Dijkstra
It is downright sinful to teach the abstract before the concrete.
—Z. A. Melzak: Companion to Concrete Mathematics
If you have too many special cases, you are doing it wrong.
—Craig Zerouni, Computer FX Ltd. London. England, quote in 'More Programming Pearls'
The software is done;
we are just trying to get it to work.
— statement made in a Joint STARS E-8A FSD Executive Program Review
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure
than 10 functions on 10 data structures.
— Alan Perlis (1922-1990), first recipient of the ACM Turing Award
Status:
There are just a few so far.
I'll be adding more soon.
Call To Action:
Feel free to post your favorite quotes in the comments below!
Top comments (0)