Software Development Tags: programming

Tag: programming

As soon as we started programming, we found out 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 - 1949

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

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.
- Bjarne Stroustrup

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
- C. A. R. Hoare - often misattributed to D. E. Knuth,who was himself quoting Hoare

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!
- Edsger Dijkstra

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.
- Anonymous - From Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme

At any particular point in time, the features provided by our programming languages reflect our understanding of software and programming.
- R. E. Fairley - Software Engineering Concepts 1985

Good programming is good writing.
- John Shore, The Sachertorte Algorithm: And Other Antidotes to Computer Anxiety by John Shore , ISBN: 0140080376

Planning is alWork when you’re fresh; stop when you’re tired.
- Kent Beck - "Programming as a garden: Permaprogramming" (talk

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 cräp sold by those who think they can surf on the previous half-century's worth of inventions forever.
- Eric Naggum

Documentation is the castor oil of programming.
- Gerald M. Weinberg

There is nothing in the programming field more despicable than an undocumented program.
- Ed Yourdon

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.
- Edsger Dijkstra - From wikiquote.org.

In programming, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.
- Paul Graham - From his Oscon 2004 address, printed at http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
- Brian Wilson Kernighan

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
- Douglas Adams - From "Last Chance to See"

If debugging is the process of removing bugs. Then programming must be the process of putting them in.
- Edsger Dijkstra