Programming Quotes

“The only way to go fast, is to go well.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.”
― Prince, The Beautiful Ones Sheet Music

“User interface is the process of shifting from chaotic complexity to elegant simplicity.”
― Akshat Paul, React Native for iOS Development

“Happiness should be a function without any parameters.”
― Pranshu Midha

“Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming
issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance
with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a
list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary
delivery
■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

“Rust’s central feature is ownership. Although the feature is straightforward to explain, it has deep implications for the rest of the language.

All programs have to manage the way they use a computer’s memory while running. Some languages have garbage collection that constantly looks for no longer used memory as the program runs; in other languages, the programmer must explicitly allocate and free the memory. Rust uses a third approach: memory is managed through a system of ownership with a set of rules that the compiler checks at compile time. None of the ownership features slow down your program while it’s running.”
― Steve Klabnik, The Rust Programming Language

“Schools are in many ways perhaps the first step in getting us to understand that institutions control our lives and that we should accept unquestionably that there can be no objection to this.”
― Mango Wodzak, Discovering Eden Fruitarianism - An Autobiography - Volume One

“If it's not written, it never happened. If it is written, it doesn't matter what happened.”
― Sercan Leylek

“Artificial intelligence is nowhere near attaining actual sentience or awareness. And without awareness it’s simply a mechanical device, which may pretend to show emotions and sentience, if it is programmed to do so, and thus it may be able to fool the humans as being alive, but in its own internal circuitry, it’d simply be following its preprogrammed tasks through the flowchart of an algorithm.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.”
― Donald Knuth

“In languages with a garbage collector (GC), the GC keeps track and cleans up memory that isn’t being used anymore, and we don’t need to think about it. Without a GC, it’s our responsibility to identify when memory is no longer being used and call code to explicitly return it, just as we did to request it. Doing this correctly has historically been a difficult programming problem. If we forget, we’ll waste memory. If we do it too early, we’ll have an invalid variable. If we do it twice, that’s a bug too. We need to pair exactly one allocate with exactly one free.

Rust takes a different path: the memory is automatically returned once the variable that owns it goes out of scope.”
― Steve Klabnik, The Rust Programming Language

“Inheritance has recently fallen out of favor as a programming design solution in many programming languages because it’s often at risk of sharing more code than necessary. Subclasses shouldn’t always share all characteristics of their parent class but will do so with inheritance. This can make a program’s design less flexible. It also introduces the possibility of calling methods on subclasses that don’t make sense or that cause errors because the methods don’t apply to the subclass. In addition, some languages will only allow a subclass to inherit from one class, further restricting the flexibility of a program’s design.

For these reasons, Rust takes a different approach, using trait objects instead of inheritance.”
― Steve Klabnik, The Rust Programming Language

“Tom Demarco, a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild team of consultants ... and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games. The purpose of the games was to identify the characteristics of the best and worst computer programmers; more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter — such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work — had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with 10 years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10 percent more than the half below — even though they were almost twice as good. The programmers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programmers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said that their workspace was acceptably private, compared to only 19 percent of the worst performers; 76 percent of the worst performers but only 38 percent of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it's doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the "what".”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“For many purposes, we need to understand the world as having things in it that are related to each other, not just variables with values. For example, we might notice that a large truck ahead of us is reversing into the driveway of a dairy farm but a cow has got loose and is blocking the truck’s path. A factored representation is unlikely to be pre-equipped with the attribute TruckAheadBackingIntoDairyFarmDrivewayBlockedByLooseCow with value true or false”
― Stuart Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

“Introduction to Python Programming is an outcome of our sincere effort geared towards students community.”
― Gowrishankar S.

“Second-guessing a decision made by a programming-language designer is the first step on the road to becoming one.”
― Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne

“Quote may seem a bit of a foreign concept, because few other languages have anything like it. It's closely tied to one of the most distinctive features of Lisp: code and data are made out of the same data structures, and the quote operator is the way we distinguish between them.”
― Paul Graham

“Who do you listen to? Who influences your day to day decisions? Many of us are being led & misled away from our own thinking power.”
― Rosangel Perez

“Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.”
― David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.”
― Maurice Wilkes, Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer

“End-to-End encryption is practically a meaningless phrase used by internet-based companies to coax people into believing the modern myth of online privacy.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“When you see through what the conditioned mind-body thinks things mean, in particular its judgments of good and bad, you awaken to your true nature as peace and oneness with the spiritual essence of all life.”
― Andrew Seaton

“The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.”
― Audrey Watters, The Monsters of Education Technology

“If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.”
― Paul Graham

“When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.”
― James Hague

“The only way to make sure that you don't lose your job with the arrival of AI, is to do something that AI cannot do, and the only thing that artificial intelligence cannot do but a human can, is being original. So, do something original and no AI can ever replace you.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“If oy have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it's doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the "what".”
― Martin Fowler, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

“It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200,000,000 can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it.”
― Justice Robert H. Jackson