137 Programming Quotes

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

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.

You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

But the possibility of abuse may be a good reason for leaving capabilities out of other computer languages, it's not a good reason for leaving capabilities out of Perl.

Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

There's often more than one correct thing. There's often more than one right thing. There's often more than one obvious thing.

I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.

The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)

I note that the Python folks still think they like JPython. I wonder how long that will last?

Accidental stacks considered harmful.

And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it's not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally...

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

The autodecrement is not magical.

Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other.

Many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

The 1973 Labour Conference will have before it the most radical programme the Party has prepared since 1945.

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something. :-)

I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used 'perform' instead of 'do'.

Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.

I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

Someone helped us a lot with the atomic bomb. The intelligence (service) played a huge role. These Rosenbergs suffered in America. It is not excluded that they helped us. But we shouldn't really speak about it, because we might receive this kind of help in the future.

We didn't put in ^^ because then we'd have to keep telling people what it means, and then we'd have to keep telling them why it doesn't short circuit. :-/

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

If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into die 'Illegal division by zero

#define NULL 0 /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */

#define SIGILL 6 /* blech */

break; /* don't do magic till later */

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

#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */

/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */

It's all magic. :-)

Help save the world!

C4's prime marketing concept is the appeal to a 16-34 audience. This has some strange consequences-a series explaining Islam, for example, is entrusted to Peaches Geldof. There's an obsession with adolescent transgression and sex. Gordon Ramsay is hired to make a series called The F Word; Designer Vaginas is followed by The World's Biggest Penis. Earlier this autumn, unless I dreamed it, we were subject to a 'wank week.'

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

I fear -as far as I can tell- that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

Actually I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system.

The worst programs are the ones where the programmers doing the original work don't lay a solid foundation, and then they're not involved in the program in the future.

You have to wait for people to program you. The only difference is the amount of people that you're going to reach but that's going to even out in the next two or three years anyway. Computers are being bought faster than televisions right now.

Be consistent.

... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About Lisp programming language)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1985)