Kevin TC > Kevin's Quotes

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
― Martin Fowler

“usually more time is spent in making good-looking presentation slides than in improving the quality of the software.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete

“Try to create modules that depend little on other modules. Make them detached, as business associates are, rather than attached, as Siamese twins are.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete

“Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, 'How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?' Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

“Copy and paste is a design error”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete

“few people can understand more than three levels of nested ifs”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete

“complicated code is a sign that you don't understand your program well enough to make it simple.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete

“As Thomas Hobbes observed in the 17th century, life under mob rule is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Life on a poorly run software project is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and hardly ever short enough.”
― Steve McConnell, Software Project Survival Guide

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”
― Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language

“If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.”
― Bill Gates

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
― Bill Gates

“Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”
― Linus Torvalds

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”
― Steve Jobs

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."

[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]”
― Steve Jobs

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
― Steve Jobs

“Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code