Rony Aurora > Rony's Quotes

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
― Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”
― John Woods

“The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science

“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.”
― Larry Niven

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”
― Kent Beck

“Truth can only be found in one place: the code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
― Joseph Weizenbaum

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”
― Edward V. Berard

“Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
― Keith Bostic

“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.”
― Larry Wall

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”
― Brian Kernighan

“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

“Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.”
― Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software

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

“Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. ”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Don't gloss over a routine or piece of code involved in the bug because you "know" it works. Prove it. Prove it in this context, with this data, with these boundary conditions.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual

“Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant
to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap
bubble?”
― Alan J Perlis

“What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?”
― James Alan Gardner, Ascending

“I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“Second-guessing a decision made by a programming-language designer is the first step on the road to becoming one.”
― Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne

“You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.”
― Cory Althoff, The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally

“So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack,”
― Kernighan Brian W.

“The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

“Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential.”
― Robert C. Martin, Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

“The problem with a completely new programming paradigm isn’t learning a new lan‐
guage. After all, everyone reading this has learned numerous computer languages—
language syntax is merely details. The tricky part is learning to think in a different way.”
― Neal Ford, Functional Thinking: Paradigm Over Syntax