28 Coding Quotes

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all... :-)

That being said, I think we should immediately deprecate any string concatenation that combines '19' with '99'. :-)

A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.

'Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.' (2002)

... an initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers ... What they really hate are lousy programmers.

Y'know, there are other possibilities if we assume that filenames are UTF-8...yikes...wait, put down that meat cleaver! Aieeee!!!

It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket... [...] And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding. :-)

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.

I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants.

switch (ref $@) { OverflowError => warn 'Dam needs to be drained'; DomainError => warn 'King needs to be trained'; NuclearWarError => die; }

print rand rand rand 1, ' '; # interesting distribution

stab_val(stab)->str_nok = 1; /* what a wonderful hack! */

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

Programs today get very fat; the enhancements tend to slow the programs down because people put in special checks. When they want to add some feature, they'll just stick in these checks without thinking how they might slow the thing down.