Programming Quotes

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don’t know why.

Confusing prototyping with engineering tends to be a big one (common mistakes software developers make). People slap things together to build a prototype and then they go: "Woo, now I got to deploy it!" And I was like: "Noo! Prototype is a learning experience. You hit the "DELETE" button! And then you rewrite it." I'm a big believer in deleting.

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A benefit of GUIs is WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get. The disadvantage is WYSIAYG - what you see is all you get.

..clarity and correctness matter much more than the utmost speed.

Ultimately, if you can’t do the process, you can’t do the product. It’s much easier to find someone who can make software work than it is to find someone who can make the making of software work.

Give someone a program, and you'll frustrate them for a day. Teach someone to program, and you'll frustrate them for a lifetime.

Give someone a program, and you'll frustrate them for a day. Teach someone to program, and you'll frustrate them for a lifetime.

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.

One of the beauties of OO programming is code re-use through inheritance, but to achieve it programmers have to actually let other programmers re-use the code.

NOT 'GETTING' ALGEBRA IS NOT ACCEPTABLE FOR A MATHEMATICIAN, AS NOT 'GETTING' POINTERS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE FOR PROGRAMMERS. TOO FUNDAMENTAL.

Code is poetry.

All code breaks. Great code breaks well.

Programming costs money, engineering saves money.

Programming costs money, engineering saves money.

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.

Keep it simple, stupid!