Programming Quotes

[arethuza]

Missing the Ninety-ninety rule?

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

 Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

NB There should probably be a 90-90-90-90-<recurring> rule... could called the Y-90 rule!

[Bekwnn]

Probably because the "and the last 10 is the other 90" quote has existed longer than programming has. It's borrowed.

[corodra]

"I should have run off with that hippie girl and started a homestead in Alaska."

Me, every fucking time I look at code.

[gpcz]

In "The Soul of a New Machine," there is an engineer who spends months debugging nanosecond-level glitches in their new CPU, snaps, and runs away after leaving a note: "I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

[corodra]

It is funny though. Look at all the physicists and mathematicians in that quote list. Positive, enlightened, a little snark maybe, but generally, moving things forward for the betterment of humanity.

All the programmers, "embrace the suck and the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train".

I picked the wrong career.

[vram22]

I like this one:

"Debugging a program is twice as hard as writing it in the first place. So, by definition, if you write the program as cleverly as you can, you will not be able to debug it."

- (Maybe by) Brian Kernighan.

[justinpombrio]

Missing what I think is the most important quote:

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious."

- Fred Brooks

[tasuki]

My favourite as well!

[osrec]

> If you’re capable of understanding `finalised virtual hyperstationary factory class', remembering the Java class hierarchy, and all the details of the Java Media Framework, you are (a) a better man than i am (b) capable of filling your mind with large chunks of complexity, so concurrent programming should be simple by comparison. go for it.

> ps. i made up the hyperstationary, but then again, it’s probably a design pattern.

        — forsyth

---

Reminds me of a great deal of programmers in the banking world, especially those who used spring. Their software often failed, but their knowledge of Java design patterns never did!

[champagnepapi]

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

[abarrak]

I grouped XML quotes to share with my manager:

The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well.

        — Phil Wadler, POPL 2003

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.

        — Heard from someone working at Microsoft

XML is like violence. Sure, it seems like a quick and easy solution at first, but then it spirals out of control into utter chaos.

        — Sarkos in reddit

Most xml i’ve seen makes me think i’m dyslexic. it also looks constipated, and two health problems in one standard is just too much.

        — Charles Forsyth

Nobody who uses XML knows what they are doing.

        — Chris Wenham

[rkowalick]

That page misses my favorite XML quote, which is also on cat-v at http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/:

XML is a classic political compromise: it balances the needs of man and machine by being equally unreadable to both.

  - Matthew Might

[nerdponx]

What are some valid complaints about XML? I was talking to one of the older IT guys at my company a while ago, and he was all about it because it made serializing data structures very simple. I'm not sure if that's a valid use case or an example of the kind of monstrosity that XML-haters hate.

[hateful]

Years ago there was a list of top 10 lists I had printed out, but I haven't been able to find them. One of the lists was "Top 10 signs you're a Microsoft programmer" and #1 or 2 was something along the lines of: "You think human teleportation will eventually be possible, and XML will be the transport."

[hiccuphippo]

Here's one I've seen around:

"Often a few hours of trial and error will save you minutes of looking through manuals."

[falcor84]

Seems to be a corollary of Frank Westheimer's "A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library".

[tokyodude]

Hrm, my experience is quite the opposite. I can read a 2000 page manual which will take weeks because there's no way I can concentrate on all of it and where I probably still won't actually find the answer to my question which is an edge case OR I can just try the edge case and see what happens.

If I knew exactly where to look in the manual then the quote might fit but it rarely does.

[senozhatsky]

Love it! Do you happen to know who said it?

-ss

[johnvega]

Part of why I like Golang as I interpret beauty as readability.

"Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity."

        — David Gelernter

[aard]

One of my favorites:

"If you know what’s in it, you don’t know when it will ship. If you know when it will ship, you don’t know what’s in it."

[LargeWu]

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.

[scandox]

Basically all the really useful code I've written

[petercooper]

If you'd like to be drip fed stuff like this, we've been running a programming quotes Twitter account for several years at https://twitter.com/codewisdom

[jeffwass]

LOL, 40 years later and some things never change :

“The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.”

- Brian W. Kernighan, in the paper Unix for Beginners(1979)

[tanklessmilk]

This is fantastic. Whenever I'm at work, I always look at deltas on commits to judge personal success. The more lines removed, the better!

> Deleted code is debugged code.

        — Jeff Sickel

[bjpbakker]

> The more lines removed, the better

I programmed Perl for a while so I like to make this more about _characters_ removed rather than lines :)

[mikmoila]

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

[equalunique]

Everyone post your favorites.

> What's wrong with perl?

It combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

> To me perl is the triumph of utalitarianism.

So are cockroaches. So is `sendmail'.

        — jwz [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=33F4D777.7BF84EA3%40netscape.com]*

 ~ and ~

If the designers of X Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles – but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature that.

[kps]

> but you’d be able to shift gears with your car stereo.

Many modern cars get pretty close.

[belltyler]

"If debugging is the art of finding bugs, programming must be the art of creating them."

[waynecochran]

"Given enough thrust pigs will fly" -- I will use this for my next code review. Gold.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Missing the infamous "It compiles! Ship it!" quote.

[gnulinux]

For something like rust or haskell it's not outrageous. But yeah...

[spion]

Ah, quotes, the method of taking wisdom out of context and greatly increasing the chances of incorrect interpretation. The ancient form of twitter.

[olooney]

"Epigrams are more like vitamins than protein." - Alan Perlis