Programming and software development quotes
By David Pratt / Tags: quotes / 9 Comments / December 28th, 2009
If you’ve not had a read through the stack overflow thread on great programming quotes I thoroughly recommend doing so – some good stuff in there! Here are some of my favourite quotes from the thread that I thought I might share here (not all of the quotes were referring to programming when they were made, but they seem very applicable nonetheless!):
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“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”
- Edward V Berard
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“The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”
- Seymour Cray
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With regard to adding more programmers to get a project done faster…
“Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.”
- Fred Brooks
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“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
- Bill Gates
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“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
- Hofstadter’s Law
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“When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.”
- Unknown
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“Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.”
- Thomas C. Gale
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“Linux is only free if your time has no value.”
- Jamie Zawinski
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Something David Parnas said in an interview:
Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?
A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S. exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.
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On programmers of dubious ability:
“Better train people and risk they leave – than do nothing and risk they stay.”
- Unknown
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“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
- Douglas Adams
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“Think twice before you start programming or you will program twice before you start thinking.”
- Unknown
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“Debugging is like farting – it’s not so bad when it’s your own code.”
- Unknown
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“Confidence, n.: The feeling you have before you understand the situation”
- Unknown
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“Good judgement is the result of experience … Experience is the result of bad judgement.”
- Fred Brooks
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“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
- James Goldsmith
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“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
- Thomas A. Edison
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“When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.”
- Richard Pattis
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“Your code is both good and original. Unfortunately the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.”
- Unknown
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“In my experience, one of the most significant problems in software development is assuming. If you assume a method will passed the right parameter value, the method will fail.”
- Paul M. Duvall
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“First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.”
- John Johnson
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“Now I’m a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.”
- Martin Fowler
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“Get it right. Then get it fast.”
- Steve McConnell
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“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
Citatos | kran.lt December 30th, 2009 at 10:12 am
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