Brainy Josh > Brainy's Quotes

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

“when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”
― Why The Lucky Stiff

“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

“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”
― Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others, self-harm, and suicide attempts.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“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

“Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day.
Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.”
― Muhammad Waseem

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

“How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

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

“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

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
― Charles Babbage

“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

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

“The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”
― Alan Kay

“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

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