Nice collection, I added some of them to my collection.
The C++ == octopus made by nailing extra legs to a dog is one of the
best quotes ever, and is in my C++ page together with many other
wonderful C++ quotes ;) http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/
Oh, and the one about X being like calculating the square root of PI
using roman numerals is AFAIK attributed to Henry Spencer.
Peace
uriel
On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 9:46 PM, Kris Maglione<maglione.k_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 02:41:04PM +0200, Uriel wrote:
>>
>> lets use this thread to post your favorite programming quotes.
>
> C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
>
> The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
> --Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
>
> 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
>
> For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading
> edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer
> is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things,
> while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do
> incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
> --Bill Bryson
>
> 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.
> --Rich Cook
>
> I'm confident that tomorrow's Unix will look like today's Unix, only
> cruftier.
> --Russ Cox
>
> 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
>
> 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
>
> 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
>
> Get and set methods are evil.
> --Allen Holub
>
> 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
>
> Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.
> --Alan Kay
>
> We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time:
> premature optimization is the root of all evil.
> --Donald Knuth
>
> Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs
> which are copies of the communication structures of these
> organizations. (For example, if you have four groups working on a
> compiler, you’ll get a 4-pass compiler)
> --Conway’s Law
>
> For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple,
> and wrong.
> --H. L. Mencken
>
> (Yes, this is related to programming, whether or not it was
> meant to)
>
> 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
>
> For the time being, programming is a consumer job, assembly line
> coding is the norm, and what little exciting stuff is being performed
> is not going to make it compared to the mass-marketed crap sold by
> those who think they can surf on the previous half-century's worth of
> inventions forever.
> --Eric Naggum
>
> Intellectual laziness is punishable by brain death. It is a natural
> law.
> --Eric Naggum
>
> Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the
> answer.
> --Eric Naggum
>
> Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from
> sarcasm.
> --Eric Naggum
>
> 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
>
> Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was
> written, and another for which it wasn't.
> --Alan J. Perlis
>
> 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
>
> (Oh, we *love* this one!)
>
> A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
> in than some that do.
> --Dennis M. Ritchie
>
> The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
> intelligent full of doubt.
> --Bertrand Russell
>
> Deleted code is debugged code.
> --Jeff Sickel
>
> 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
>
> (We all hate PHP here, don't we? (dissenters best not speak
> lest they provoke a harsh tirade))
>
> You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
> --Ken Thompson
>
> Saying that Java is good because it works on all platforms is like
> saying anal sex is good because it works on all genders.
> --Unknown
>
> Programming X Windows is like trying to find the square root of Pi
> using roman numerals.
> --Unknown
>
> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
> --Leonardo da Vinci
>
> Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as
> sophistication, which is baffling---the incomprehensible should cause
> suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a
> mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an
> aura of power on the user.
> --Niklaus Wirth
>
> --
> Kris Maglione
>
> For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public
> relations for nature cannot be fooled.
> --Richard Feynman
>
>
>
Received on Wed Jul 01 2009 - 22:30:09 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Wed Jul 01 2009 - 22:36:01 UTC