
Ask HN: What are your favourite computer programming quotes - bobnarizes
Please also write the author
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LukasRos
Right now I can think of one which is not about programming itself but uses a
programming analogy to explain politics:

"Being POTUS must be like inheriting a 240 year old code base and being asked
to fix it in 4 years while half your team tries to sandbag you."

source:
[https://twitter.com/gblache/status/784201528110448640](https://twitter.com/gblache/status/784201528110448640)

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aargh_aargh
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there
is nothing left to take away." \-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

(Programming wasn't the original context; design in general was.)

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mbrock
Christopher Alexander writing in his preface to Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns
of Software."

> In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits
> young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of
> standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good
> as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, “Of course not,
> that isn’t what I am trying to do. . . . I could never do that.”

> Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: “That standard must be our
> standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile.
> That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect
> of my students.” Gradually, I show the students that they have a right to
> ask this of themselves, and must ask this of themselves. Once that level of
> standard is in their minds, they will be able to figure out, for themselves,
> how to do better, how to make something that is as profound as that.

> Two things emanate from this changed standard. First, the work becomes more
> fun. It is deeper, it never gets tiresome or boring, because one can never
> really attain this standard. One’s work becomes a lifelong work, and one
> keeps trying and trying. So it becomes very fulfilling, to live in the light
> of a goal like this. But secondly, it does change what people are trying to
> do. It takes away from them the everyday, lower-level aspiration that is
> purely technical in nature, (and which we have come to accept) and replaces
> it with something deep, which will make a real difference to all of us that
> inhabit the earth.

> I would like, in the spirit of Richard Gabriel’s searching questions, to ask
> the same of the software people who read this book. But at once I run into a
> problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres
> of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people
> writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program
> on the same level as Fermat’s last theorem? Can you write a program which
> has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary? Can you write a program
> which has the productive power of Watt’s steam engine? Can you write a
> program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our
> civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as
> Eliot’s poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf’s "The Waves"?

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jamesmp98
“PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas
Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted
professionals.”

— Jon Ribbens

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a-saleh
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway. (Andrew S. Tanenbaum in Computer Networks)

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code_Whisperer
Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning.

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metalon
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

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aargh_aargh
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time:
premature optimization is the root of all evil." \--Donald Knuth

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somecallitblues
Never deploy shit on Friday! (Colleague)

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deepaksurti
? Why do functional programmers homeschool their kids? \- Because they hate
classes

I read this in a tweet:
[https://twitter.com/msafi/status/782383733525454848](https://twitter.com/msafi/status/782383733525454848)

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BlueKitt
This is my favourite one: Programming is like kicking yourself in the face,
sooner or later your nose will bleed. Kyle Woodbury

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simon_acca
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes.

— (Mis)attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, 1970

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baccredited
'Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone
to death with a loaded Uzi.'

Larry Wall

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aargh_aargh
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." \--Grace Hopper

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aargh_aargh
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and
naming things." \-- Phil Karlton

~~~
dasboth
I know this as "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache
invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

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pasbesoin
Not programming specific: TANSTAAFL.

Also, Garbage In, Garbage Out is pretty good.

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Rainymood
"Everything is fast for small n."

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chestnut-tree
This is a quote by Niklaus Wirth, a Swiss computer scientist who has created
many programming languages, most famously Pascal. It's a long quote, but I
like it very much:

 _" 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. It is maintained for commercial reasons only. Object-
oriented programming (OOP) solidly rests on the principles and concepts of
traditional procedural programming (PP). OOP has not added a single novel
concept, but it emphasizes two concepts much more strongly that was done with
procedural programming.

The first such concept is that of the procedure bound to a composite variable
called object. (The binding of the procedure is the justification for it being
called a method). The means for this binding is the procedure variable (or
record field), available in languages since the mid 1970s. The second concept
is that of constructing a new data type (called subclass) by extending a given
type (the superclass).

It is worthwhile to note that along with the OOP paradigm came an entirely new
terminology with the purpose of mystifying the roots of OOP. Thus, whereas you
used to be able to activate a procedure by calling it, one now sends a message
to the method. A new type is no longer built by extending a given type, but by
defining a subclass which inherits its superclass. An interesting phenomenon
is that many people learned for the first time about the important notions of
data type, of encapsulation, and (perhaps) of information hiding when
introduced to OOP. This alone would have made the introduction to OOP
worthwhile, even if one didn't actually make use of its essence later on.

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that
is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires
sound knowledge of procedural programming. Static modularization is the first
step towards OOP. It is much easier to understand and master than full OOP,
it's sufficient in most cases for writing good software, and is sadly
neglected in most common languages (with the exception of Ada).

In a way, OOP falls short of its promises. Our ultimate goal is extensible
programming (EP). By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules,
each module adding new functionality to the system. EP implies that the
addition of a module is possible without any change in the existing modules.
They need not even be recompiled. New modules not only add new procedures, but
- more importantly - also new (extended) data types. We have demonstrated the
practicality and economy of this approach with the design of the Oberon
System."_

Taken from:
[http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html](http://www.eptacom.net/pubblicazioni/pub_eng/wirth.html)

