

Favourite Programming Quotes - rlmw
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/39/whats-your-favourite-quote-about-programming

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edanm
This just takes the cake, because it's so true and so _old_ :

"On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the
machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member
of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question.
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could
provoke such a question. — Charles Babbage"

~~~
dctoedt
The questioners -- each of whom was a member of Parliament -- might have been
using a superficially-polite circumlocution to raise (what we would now call)
the GIGO question.

~~~
edanm
Interesting, never heard that phrase.

Anyone who's interested, GIGO means "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Wiki:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIGO>.

By the way, the Wikipedia page specifically mentions Babbage's quote.

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silentbicycle
"If you don't have the right abstractions, you can make things artificially
difficult." - Joe Armstrong

"How long will people continue believing in the myth of the 15-year-old hacker
genius while simultaneously decrying the unreliability of software before the
cognitive dissonance finally cracks?" - Dave Herman
([http://calculist.blogspot.com/2005/12/12-weeks-with-
geeks.ht...](http://calculist.blogspot.com/2005/12/12-weeks-with-geeks.html))

Also, there are quite a few at cat-v (<http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/>).

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iwwr
_There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the
ones nobody uses_

Bjarne Stroustrup

~~~
Avshalom
Well, and COBOL, but I don't blame Bjarne for pretending it doesn't exist.

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jamii
A couple of favourites:

"I'm not a computer guy,” they'll say with a big smile on their face. Well
gee, the personal computer is only the most significant invention to come
along in the past 100 years. You'd think one might be mildly curious about how
it works. -- Anon

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free
to concentrate on more advanced problems, and, in effect, increases the mental
power of the race. -- Alfred Whitehead (replace notation by abstraction and it
holds for programming too)

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

Eventually a friend of a friend is a security hole -- Anon

~~~
hakl
I think the Whitehead quote applies as is: unnecessarily complex syntax makes
me stupider.

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Luyt
"Good programming is not learned from generalities, but by seeing how
significant programs can be made clean, easy to read, easy to maintain and
modify, human-engineered, efficient, and reliable, by the application of
common sense and good programming practices. Careful study and imitation of
good programs leads to better writing." _\- Kernighan and Plauger, motto of
'Software Tools'_

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rlmw
I quite liked "Walking on water and developing software from a specification
are easy if both are frozen."

~~~
rlmw
Oh, and "Nine people can't make a baby in a month."

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nuxi
Ouch:

    
    
      “I saw `cout’ being shifted “Hello world” times to the left and stopped right there.”
        — Steve Gonedes
    

(via <http://q4td.blogspot.com/search/label/programming>)

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aaronbrethorst
This one was a new for me:

> There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming
> things, and off-by-1 errors.

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ctkrohn
"Debugging: considered with dread, attempted with reluctance, bragged about
with enthusiasm"

Not sure what the original source is, or even what the original formulation
is, but it rings true to me.

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meadhikari
This simple thought makes your code quite good looking.

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent
psychopath who knows where you live.

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J3L2404
"Every program can be reduced by at least one line and every program contains
at least one error. Therefore every program can be reduced to one line, which
is wrong!"

Dan Garcia

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rick_2047
Not exactly programming, but more about cracking

"cracking is like sex with a prostitute, you have to get in, take all the
goodies and get out without leaving a trace."

EDIT: spelling mistake

~~~
rick_2047
Downvoted? I can't imagine how this could be wrong, care to explain?

