Dijana > Dijana's Quotes

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can.”
― Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain

“The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.”
― Alan Kay

“The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.”
― Alan Kay

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
― Alan Kay

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

“All I want to tell young people is that you're not going to be anything in life unless you learn to commit to a goal. You have to reach deep within yourself to see if you are willing to make the sacrifices.”
― Louis Zamperini, Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian's Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II

“Someone who doesn't make the (Olympic) team might weep and collapse. In my day no one fell on the track and cried like a baby. We lost gracefully. And when someone won, he didn't act like he'd just become king of the world, either. Athletes in my day were simply humble in our victory.
I believe we were more mature then...Maybe it's because the media puts so much pressure on athletes; maybe it's also the money. In my day we competed for the love of the sport...In my day we patted the guy who beat us on the back, wished him well, and that was it.”
― Louis Zamperini, Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian's Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II

“To live, a man needs food, water, and a sharp mind.”
― Louis Zamperini, Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian's Astonishing Story of Survival as a Japanese POW in World War II

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

“It is not enough for code to work.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“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

“As data and science become more accessible and more the production of software and AI, human creativity is becoming a more valuable commodity.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“The Joel Test

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?
4. Do you have a bug database?
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7. Do you have a spec?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10. Do you have testers?
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“If, at first, you do not succeed, call it version 1.0.”
― Khayri R.R. Woulfe

“Coding like poetry should be short and concise.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“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

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

“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

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

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

“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

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

“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

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

“A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.”
― Marvin Minsky

“A conscious human is driven by their conscience, not popular opinion.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.”
― Robert C. Martin

“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