Programming quotes

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets. - Alan Cooper

Changing random stuff until your program works is bad coding practice, but if you do it fast enough it’s Machine Learning. - @manisha72617183

Make it work, then make it beautiful, then if you really, really have to, make it fast. 90 percent of the time, if you make it beautiful, it will already be fast. So really, just make it beautiful! - Joe Armstrong

For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change - @KentBeck

If it’s your decision, it’s design; if not, it’s a requirement. - Alistair Cockburn

The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can’t see the problem at all. - Brian Kernighan

I’m not a great programmer. I’m just a good programmer with great habits. - @KentBeck

Making things easy to do is a false economy. Focus on making things easy to understand and the rest will follow. - Peter Bourgon

Choosing the right limitations for a certain problem domain is often much more powerful than allowing anything. - Jason Moiron

Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order. - Wes Dyer

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. - Dave Parnas

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment. - Kent Beck

Programming is nitpicking distilled into a profession. - @garybernhardt

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it may still have subtle differences only a domain expert really understands. - @rickasaurus

A computer is like a mischievous genie. It will give you exactly what you ask for, but not always what you want. – Joe Sondow

You haven’t mastered a tool until you understand when it should not be used. - @kelseyhightower

Mathematicians don’t have the ‘cache invalidation’ problem, so they go hard on fucking up naming things. - @tomaka17

The plural of regex is regrets - @ifosteve

Knock, Knock.
Who’s Race Condition!
There?
@justenwalker

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by legacy code - @HackerNewsOnion

Why do people find DNS so difficult? It’s just cache invalidation and naming things. – @jdub

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. – Poul Anderson

The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty. – Nicoll Hunt

Developers are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame, often with the same outcome. – The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford

The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy. – @Pinboard (?)

There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery. – @mathiasverraes

The essential bit is that developers understand that the value we provide is understanding itself. Not the artifact per se. (Though understanding w/o an artifact is potentially worse than vice versa.) – @potetm

I keep telling people ‘programming is understanding’ – the computer is a machine that tests if your ideas are correct. Once you understand a problem the program can usually be written pretty quickly. Understanding a problem can take years. – @joeerl

If you’re afraid to test in production, remember that your customers are always testing in production. – @jeffsussna

Every developer has a test environment. Some are lucky enough to also have a separate production system. – @stahnma

No matter how many tests we write…we always find the most serious bugs when we go off script. – @TestObsessed

To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is devops. – @DEVOPS_BORAT

What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months. – Fred Brooks (maybe)

Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works. – Michael Hartung

Static types give me the same feeling of safety as the announcement that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device. – Attributed to Don Roberts by Martin Fowler.

The Release Uncertainty Principle says you can accurately know what the software will do, or when you will get it, but not both. – @sanityinc

What programming continuously teaches me is that asking the right questions is infinitely more important than writing the code. – @DanielMiessler

The barman asks what the first one wants, two race conditions walk into a bar. – @iamdevloper

Programming is a few brief moments of sublime elegance embedded in months of niggling, exacting, precise trivialities. – @MrAlanCooper

The only programs that don’t get changed are those that are so bad that nobody wants to use them. – David Parnas

The act of describing a program in unambiguous detail and the act of programming are one and the same. — Kevlin Henney

Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification. — Fred Brooks

A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will be able to express themselves clearly in comments. — Kevlin Henney

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. — Linus Torvalds

Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime. — David Leinweber

Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer. — @fortes

It’s hard enough to find an error in your code when you’re looking for it; it’s even harder when you’ve assumed your code is error-free. ― Steve McConnell

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing. ― Dick Brandon

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. - Edward V Berard

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

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