Win The Life

I guess some of today's programming has rubbed off on me because I find myself having to set time around for touring, putting that together and then setting time around for recording.-Bootsy Collins

 

I have always been making art from an early age but for nearly forty years did computer programming to earn a living. I bought a house and put my wife and three children through college. Now that diversion is over so I can finally paint full time.-Mike Thompson

 

I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming.-Ted Koppel

 

I have no idea how to become successful in children's tv programming today other than to say that whereever you find that rare animal being pursued, insert yourself into its environment; get in the door in any position and work from within.-William Jackson

 

I like to protect children. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having adult programming for mature adults that can selectively decide what they want to watch and what they don't want to watch.-Burt Ward

 

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.-Maya Lin

 

I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.-Francis Ford Coppola

 

I skip through the programming to watch the commercials.-Mel Karmazin

 

I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.-Steve Wozniak

 

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.-Marc Wallice

 

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.-Shawn Fanning

 

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.-Ken Thompson

 

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.-Alan Perlis

 

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.-Guido van Rossum

 

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.-Edsger Dijkstra

 

It's been quite a 'pattern interrupt', a massive change of the old programming.-Kenny Loggins

 

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.-John Carmack

 

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.-Niklaus Wirth

 

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

 

MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming.-Brit Hume

 

The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.-Alan Perlis

 

The British regulatory system was revised, so that bigger profits were encouraged, which removed the option of big spending on programming. Quality just fell off a cliff, and all the old hands either left or were fired for being too expensive.-Lee Child

 

The demand for standup in the eighties was created by how easy it was to exploit 'comedians' and create very cheap television programming.-Marc Maron

 

The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.-Stephen Wolfram

 

The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.-Dick Wolf

 

The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.-Dennis Ritchie

 

The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content.-Stephen Wolfram

 

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.-Donald Knuth

 

The second stream of material that is going to come out of this project is a programming environment and a set of programming tools where we really want to focus again on the needs of the newbie. This environment is going to have to be extremely user-friendly.-Guido van Rossum

 

The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.-Charles R. Swindoll

 

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.-Vinton Cerf

 

Through educational programming, Jewish American History Month will help raise the awareness of a people, their history and contributions. It will help combat anti-Semitism, a phenomenon that is on the rise and that unfortunately still exists in our Nation.-Jan Schakowsky

 

To devise an information processing system capable of getting along on its own - it must handle its own problems of programming, bookkeeping, communication and coordination with its users. It must appear to its users as a single, integrated personality.-Cliff Shaw

 

We do a lot of light classical programming with that, too... obviously... a lot of Tchaikovsky music, Grieg, things like that which have become less classical with classical concerts.-Skitch Henderson

 

We spend too much time fretting over the way the industry produces programming, and too little worrying about the way the public consumes it.-Michael Medved

 

We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.-Rowan Atkinson

 

We were grooving, at that point, in the same direction, but remember, Roy Hamilton and myself were going into a path and a direction that had no programming.-Solomon Burke

 

We're not programming to conservatives. We're just not eliminating their point of view.-Roger Ailes

 

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.-Steve Wozniak

 

When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children's programming.-Jim Henson

 

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. -C.A.R. Hoare

 

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. -E. W. Dijkstra

 

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there. -Gordon Bell

 

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code. -Ken Thompson

 

When in doubt, use brute force. -Ken Thompson

 

Deleted code is debugged code. -Jeff Sickel

 

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian W. Kernighan

 

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements. -Brian W. Kernighan

 

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -Brian Kernigan

 

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity. -David Gelernter

 

UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things. -Doug Gwyn

 

If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better. -John Carmack

 

A data structure is just a stupid programming language. -R. Wm. Gosper

 

The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well. -Phil Wadler

 

A program that produces incorrect results twice as fast is infinitely slower. -John Osterhout

 

Life is too short to run proprietary software. -Bdale Garbee

 

I had a nightmare once in which I a had convinced a friend how wonderful C++ is. A while later he came back., and he was mad. -Robin Rosenberg

 

XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it. -Unknown

 

XML is like violence. Sure, it seems like a quick and easy solution at first, but then it spirals out of control into utter chaos. -Sarkos in reddit

 

Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes. -Richard Hamming

 

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done. -Erik Naggum

 

Out-of-band == should be on a separate channel... -Al Viro

 

It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes. -Keith Braithwaite

 

Ethernet always wins. -Andy Bechtolsheim

 

The central enemy of reliability is complexity. -Geer et al.

 

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -Edsger W. Dijkstra

 

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions. -Edsger W. Dijkstra

 

Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs. -Dave Cutler

 

i've wondered whether Linux sysfs should be called syphilis -forsyth

 

A program is portable to the extent that it can be easily moved to a new computing environment with much less effort than would be required to write it afresh. -W. Stan Brown

 

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals. -Henry Spencer

 

Forward thinking was just the thing that made Multics what it is today. -Erik Quanstrom

 

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way -and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay. -C.A.R. Hoare

 

I remarked to Dennis [Ritchie] that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out [of Unix]. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" -Tom Van Vleck

 

RMS is to Unix, like Hitler [was] to Nietzsche. -Federico Benavento

 

Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity. -Dennis Ritchie

 

Most xml i've seen makes me think i'm dyslexic. it also looks constipated, and two health problems in one standard is just too much. -Charles Forsyth

 

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. -Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

 

Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it. -Norman Diamond

 

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set? -Edsger W. Dijkstra

 

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

 

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code. -Paul Graham

 

First, solve the problem. Then, write the code. -John Johnson

 

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. -Alan Kay

 

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little. -Bertrand Meyer

 

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration. -Ray Ozzie

 

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles – but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature that. -Marcus J. Ranum, DEC

 

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. -Dennis M. Ritchie

 

Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they're sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head. -Charles M. Strauss

 

Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP. -Autrijus Tang

 

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. -Ken Thompson

 

Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing. -Rob Pike

 

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. -Rob Pike circa 1991

 

We have persistant(sic) objects, they're called files. -Ken Thompson

 

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there. -ken

 

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you. -ken

 

A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate. -Rob Pike

 

The Purpose of Computing is Insight, Not Numbers.- Richard Hamming.

 

Every methodology I've come across has, at its kernel, a very small section labelled "do magic here". -Katie

 

For the sinner deserves not life but death, according to the disk devices. For example, start with Plan 9, which is free of sin, the case is different from His perspective. -Mark V. Shaney

 

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it. -Clay Shirky

 

Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20. -Dennis Ritchie

 

Any program that tries to be so generalized and configurable that it could handle any kind of task will either fall short of this goal, or will be horribly broken. -Chris Wenham

 

Nobody who uses XML knows what they are doing. -Chris Wenham

 

Debugging time increases as a square of the program's size. -Chris Wenham

 

 

Comparing a computer language to a human language is like comparing an operating system kernel to a popcorn kernel. -kryptkpr

 

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. -P. J. Plauger

 

Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought such noise? -Dick Gabriel

 

This is one of the reasons Lisp doesn't get anywhere. The trend to promote features so clever that you stop thinking about your problem and start thinking about the clever features. CL's loop is so powerful that people invented functional programming so that they'd never have to use it. -G_Morgan

 

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity. -William A. Wulf

 

Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence. -Edsger W. Dijkstra

 

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague. -Edsger W. Dijkstra

 

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets. -Alan Cooper, About Face

 

Code never lies, comments sometimes do. -Ron Jeffries

 

What I cannot build, I do not understand. -Richard Feynman

 

If we'd asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses" -Henry Ford

 

I (...) am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. -Douglas Adams

 

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming. The Ferraris are just gravy, honest! -John Carmack

 

I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one. -David Parnas

 

Once you've dressed and before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off. -Coco Chanel

 

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. -R. Buckminster Fuller

 

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. -Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. -Linus Torvalds

 

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. -Laurence J. Peter

 

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry. -Henry Petroski

 

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.

 

Once a new technology starts rolling, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road. -Stewart Brand

 

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. -Fred Brooks

 

... the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other. -John Carmack

 

With diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly. -Tom Duff

 

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. -Albert Einstein

 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled. -Richard Feynman

 

Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers. -Martin Fowler

 

Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance. -Jon Franklin

 

Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled. -Larry Gleason

 

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity. -C.A.R. Hoare

 

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. -Hans Hoffmann

 

Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one. -Kernighan and Plauger

 

You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything. -Donald Knuth

 

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. -Leslie Lamport

 

But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses. -Bruce Leverett

 

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code. -Robert C. MartinClean Code

 

If you want a product with certain characteristics, you must ensure that the team has those characteristics before the product's development. -Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy

 

You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families. -Jim McCarthy

 

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better. -Steve McConnell Code Complete

 

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little. -Bertrand Meyer

 

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation. -Bertrand Meyer

 

Software sucks because users demand it to. -Nathan Myhrvold

 

Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary. -Erik Naggum

 

There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about. -John von Neumann

 

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. -Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

 

Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees. -David Ogilvy

 

Good code is short, simple, and symmetrical - the challenge is figuring out how to get there. -Sean Parent

 

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. -George Santayana

 

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature! -G.B. Shaw

 

The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one. -Jonathan Shewchuk

 

It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it. -Sophocles, Ajax

 

The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong. -Verity Stob

 

A notation is important for what it leaves out. -Joseph Stoy

 

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. -Bjarne Stroustrup

 

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. -Bjarne Stroustrup

 

The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build. -Bjarne Stroustrup

 

The best is the enemy of the good. -Voltaire

 

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. -Maurice Wilkes

 

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. -Wirth's law

 

The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it. -Dr. Pamela Zave

 

I object to doing things that computers can do. -Olin Shivers

 

Simplicity -- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done -- is essential. -From the Agile Manifesto.

 

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than that which we possess ourselves. -J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does. -Larry Bossidy

 

If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how fast it doesn't work. -Mich Ravera

 

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for. -Chris Sacca

 

In software, the most beautiful code, the most beautiful functions, and the most beautiful programs are sometimes not there at all. -Jon Bentley

 

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. -Andy Rooney

 

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read. -Pliny the Elder

 

The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone. -Oswald Chambers

 

One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood. -Mark Ardis

 

The whole HTML validation exercise is questionable, but validating as XHTML is flat-out masochism. Only recommended for those that enjoy pain. Or programmers. I can't always tell the difference. -Jeff Atwood

 

When in doubt, leave it out. -Joshua Bloch

 

No code is faster than no code. -merb motto

 

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. -Dave Parnas

 

OOP is to writing a program, what going through airport security is to flying. -Richard Mansfield

 

The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. -Joe Armstrong

 

As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow. -Doug McIlroy

 

IDE features are language smells. -Reg Braithwaite

 

PHP is [the] Sarah Palin of programming languages. -killerstorm

 

A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal. -Bram Cohen

 

The comment about developers making work for themselves is also spot on. I answer a lot of programming questions, and the questions are always asked because the programmer has reached the end of a twisty maze of his own creation. Turn around, walk, spin around, and try again. You'll find a better solution. -Jonathan Rockway

 

a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity"in terms of "number of lines of code produced".In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: We should always refer to"the number of lines of code spent". -E. W. Dijkstra

 

Well, you see, after spending years cleaning up the excrements of self-styled "REAL engineers" it's either get on the tower to point and laugh or get on the tower to point and shoot. -Al Viro in lkml

 

'Layered approach' is not a magic incantation to excuse any bit of snake oil. Homeopathic remedies might not harm (pure water is pure water), but that's not an excuse for quackery. And frankly, most of the 'security improvement' crowd sound exactly like woo-peddlers. -Al Viro

 

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want. -Bram Cohen

 

Security is a state of mind. -NSA Security Manual

 

Never attribute to funny hardware that which can be adequately explained by broken locking. -Erik Quanstrom

 

Things which any idiot could write usually have the quality of having been written by an idiot. -Bram Cohen

 

In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. — Paul Graham

 

Do I really want to be using a language where memoize is a PhD-level topic? -Mark Engelberg about Haskell

 

People stop thinking and questioning [and] then its just worshipping some rules without any pruporse. -Cinap Lenrek

 

If you start programming by learning perl you will just become a menace to your self and others. -egoncasteel

 

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy. -Rob Pike

 

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary.-RnRS

 

Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law. -May's Law

 

So-called "smart" software usually is the worst you can imagine.-Christian Neukirchen

 

Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it's easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it's hard to fix. -Rob Pike

 

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today! — John Carmack

 

So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things. -Ryan Singer

 

The standard rule is, when you're in a hole, stop digging; that seems not to apply [to] software nowadays. -Ron Minnich

 

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic. -Rob Pike

 

There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection. -Rob Pike

 

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. -John Gall

 

"design patterns" are concepts used by people who can't learn by any method except memorization, so in place of actual programming ability, they memorize "patterns" and throw each one in sequence at a problem until it works — Dark_Shikari

 

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it! — John Carmack