Seunghwansohn > Seunghwansohn's Quotes

“Programming is about managing complexity: the complexity of the problem, laid upon the complexity of the machine. Because of this complexity, most of our programming projects fail.”
― Bruce Eckel, On Java 8

“We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.”
― Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming

“Erase outdated elements and rewrite programs: learn, unlearn and relearn to constantly adapt.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Engaging in 'vibe coding' as a non-technical founder is like surfing with an AI-powered board—catching waves effortlessly, but without understanding the ocean, you're one wipeout away from a crash.”
― Jason Hishmeh, The 6 Startup Stages: How Non-technical Founders Create Scalable, Profitable Companies

“Unfortunately, the most common metaphor for software development is building construction. [...] Well, software doesn’t quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening—it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost. You may move plantings relative to each other to take advantage of the interplay of light and shadow, wind and rain. Overgrown plants get split or pruned, and colors that clash may get moved to more aesthetically pleasing locations. You pull weeds, and you fertilize plantings that are in need of some extra help. You constantly monitor the health of the garden, and make adjustments (to the soil, the plants, the layout) as needed.

Business people are comfortable with the metaphor of building construction: it is more scientific than gardening, it’s repeatable, there’s a rigid reporting hierarchy for management, and so on. But we’re not building skyscrapers—we aren’t as constrained by the boundaries of physics and the real world.

The gardening metaphor is much closer to the realities of software development. Perhaps a certain routine has grown too large, or is trying to accomplish too much—it needs to be split into two. Things that don’t work out as planned need to be weeded or pruned.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Our software is fragile as well — if people built houses the way we write programs, the first woodpecker would wipe out civilization.”
― Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

“Even in the unending abyss that seals eternity at both ends,
if your function could compile to run on stray vacuum energy
and, given an input, it once returned some particular string,
it should, given that input, return that string again.
> [object Object]”
― Tim Woodruff, ServiceNow Development Handbook - 4th Edition: A compendium of ServiceNow "NOW" platform development and architecture pro-tips, guidelines, and best practices

“An understanding of every language-technical detail of a language feature or library component is neither necessary nor sufficient for writing good programs. In fact, an obsession with understanding every little detail is a prescription for awful - overelaborate and overly clever code.”
― Stroustrup Bjarne, The C++ Programming Language

“An engineers goal is to make himself obsolete.”
― Anonymous

“Lisp has jokingly been called “the most intelligent way to misuse a computer”. I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“There is a simple reason why you should commit yourself to writing programs that are free of errors from the very start. It is that you will never be able to establish that a program has no errors in it by testing. Since there is no way to be certain that you have found the last error, your real opportunity to gain confidence in a program is to never find the first error. The ultimate faith you can have in one of your programs is in the thought process that created it. With every error you find in testing and use, that faith is undermined.”
― Richard C. Linger, Structured Programming: Theory and Practice

“Programming is learned
by writing programs.”
― Brian Kernighan

“Programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different concerns.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“The programming wasn’t done surgically or electrically, or by any other sort of neurological intrusiveness. It was done socially, with nothing but talk, talk, talk.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake

“Programming is the immediate act of producing code. Software engineering is the set of policies, practices, and tools that are necessary to make that code useful for as long as it needs to be used and allowing collaboration across a team.”
― Titus Winters, Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

“The only thing worse than not knowing why some code breaks is not knowing why it worked in the first place! It's the classic "house of cards" mentality: "it works, but I'm not sure why, so nobody touch it!" You may have heard, "Hell is other people" (Sartre), and the programmer meme twist, "Hell is other people's code."
I believe truly: "Hell is not understanding my own code.”
― Kyle Simpson, You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance

“No matter which field of work you want to go in, it is of great importance to learn at least one programming language.”
― Ram Ray

“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.”
― Donald Knuth

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
― Jamie Zawinski

“For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“Programs should always have the form of paragraphs of comments that describe the intention of the program followed by paragraphs of code that implement that intention. All of the formatting should be designed to make readers as able as possible to read the code easily; the compiler doesn’t care. In particular, follow conventions of mathematics and your native language, not those you found in some random language manual. Write the comments first and then write the code, not the other way around. If you don’t know what you want to achieve and why, any code you write is, by definition, incorrect.”
― Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

“Tests shouldn’t verify units of code. Instead they should verify units of behavior: something that is meaningful for the problem domain and ideally something that a business person can recognize as useful. The number of classes it takes to implement such a unit of behavior is irrelevant. The unit could span across multiple classes or only one class, or even take up just a tiny method. [...] A test should tell a story about the problem your code helps to share, and this story should be cohesive and meaningful to a non-programmer.”
― Vladimir Khorikov, Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns

“The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.”
― Donald Knuth

“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
― Donald Knuth

“Code is read more than it is written.”
― Daniel Roy Greenfeld, Audrey Roy Greenfeld

“Stop pushing people into web development as if it is the only true career path. Instead, push people into computer science, programming, coding, etc. There is so much competition because everyone is doing it, you just create a lot of demoralized and disgruntled people. There is more to programming than web development.”
― Olawale Daniel

“An individual block of code takes moments to write, minutes or hours to debug, and can last forever without being touched again. It’s when you or someone else visits code written yesterday or ten years ago that having code written in a clear, consistent style becomes extremely useful. Understandable code frees mental bandwidth from having to puzzle out inconsistencies, making it easier to maintain and enhance projects of all sizes.”
― Daniel Roy Greenfeld, Audrey Roy Greenfeld

“Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think”
― Steve Jobs