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Sunday, September 18, 2011

From a programmer with love: Collection of programming and software quotes

Being a programmer is not easy. It is a continous strife for perfection.
Programming is like an optimization problem - with the end goals of elegance and simplicity, reliability, user-friendly, reusability, workability, performant etc. You can't have the best of all.

Some easy ways to save your neck when QAs, Managers and client shouts "bugs"!

“My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.”
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. - Rich Kulawiec
It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature. - Author Unknown
It's easy to cry "bug" when the truth is that you've got a complex system and sometimes it takes a while to get all the components to co-exist peacefully.  - Doug Vargas

Some classic programming and software quotable quotes:

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable. - Tim Berners-Lee

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

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions. - Wietse Venema

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it. - Will Wright

Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence. - Niklaus Wirth

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists. - Wietse Venema

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. - Alan Kay

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases. - Norman Ralph Augustine

Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet? - William Gibson

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting. - Wietse Venema

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. --Martin Fowler

Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, ‘How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?’ Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer. -Steve McConnell

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. -C.A.R. Hoare

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. -C.A.R. Hoare

Inside every large program, there is a small program trying to get out. -C.A.R. Hoare

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. -Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability -Edsger W.Dijkstra

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

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -Brian W. Kernighan

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

... programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time."  -Steve McConnell

“Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.” - Bill Gates

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