Favorite Programming Quotes
Aug53
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
Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry Wall
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Bill Gates
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
Once a new technology starts rolling, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
Stewart Brand
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
The hardest part of design … is keeping features out.
Donald Norman
Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
Ralph Johnson
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Edsger Dijkstra
Software and cathedrals are much the same - first we build them, then we pray.
Anonymous Preacher
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we’ve finished building it.
Anonymous Consultant
The software isn’t finished until the last user is dead.
Anonymous Support Group Member
Better train people and risk they leave - than do nothing and risk they stay.
Anonymous Technical Trainer
Programming is 10% science, 20% ingenuity, and 70% getting the ingenuity to work with the science.
Anonymous Scientist
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Anonymous Hack Actor
Bad code isn’t bad, its just misunderstood.
Anonymous Code Behaviorist
It is easier to measure something than to understand what you have measured.
Anonymous Analyst
The sooner you get behind in your work, the more time you have to catch up.
Anonymous Scheduler
When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot speak English.
Anonymous Linguist
Benchmarks don’t lie, but liars do benchmarks.
Anonymous Tester
Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?
Anonymous Code Monkey
Technorati Tags: quotes, programming, software development, softdev, anonymous, code, monkey
2:58 pm on August 17th, 2008
Edsger Dijkstra’s quote is there twice, so is the “do it over” quote.
6:59 pm on August 17th, 2008
@Leif - Thanks for that. I guess I liked those quotes so much that I inadvertently added them twice.
2:46 am on August 18th, 2008
Nice collection :)
4:33 am on August 18th, 2008
I cannot remember where I read it, even after googling:
“The only feature you don’t debug is the one you don’t implement in the first place”
12:47 pm on August 18th, 2008
“life is just another example of bad programming”
7:39 pm on August 18th, 2008
One from Martin Fowler - “The opposite of a testable design is a detestable design”
8:14 am on August 19th, 2008
I’m a programmer, and i want to change the world, but they just won’t give me the source code.
2:38 pm on August 19th, 2008
“measure twice, cut once” - steve mconnel
3:59 pm on August 19th, 2008
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction — from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn’t work.
(author unknown)
8:45 am on August 20th, 2008
Great collection.
A bug always lies in the programmer eyes :)
10:35 am on August 20th, 2008
User’s point of view: each and every feature of a program hardly achieved by a programmer is useless. The smallest con is an unsortable obstacle.
And maybe the surprisingly missing quote here: “A program is not perfect: no one has found its bugs yet.
2:44 pm on August 20th, 2008
“The only time I was wrong was when I thought I was wrong.”
11:50 pm on August 20th, 2008
If you think about it, Tom Cargill was a total moron. Logically his statement makes no sense. Nothing can consume 180 percent development time. I think what Tom wanted to say was that, 90 percent of code accounts for 10 percent of development time, and 10 percent of code accounts for 90 percent of development time. I know in my case, that I get away with murder because my peers have no clue what it takes to accomplish the tasks that I am given. Granted Ive become more managerial, but still, my development role takes little effort. Praise nerds!!
4:00 am on August 21st, 2008
Now adam is the moron…
4:08 pm on August 22nd, 2008
What about the good old one:
“God is Real, unless declared Integer”
3:17 am on August 23rd, 2008
this is my favorite quote
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
but this one has to be the funniest
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
8:02 am on August 23rd, 2008
Quality Engineers pride themselves on professional paranoia.
5:58 pm on August 23rd, 2008
So true and well said!
But yet again, what would be programming if we did the code perfect the first time?
There would be no “lovely” debugging, or no thinking over and over the same thing, just to find a misplaced ;
Great blog, keep it up
11:43 pm on August 25th, 2008
Here is a new one.
“The quality of the code is independent of whether it works or not.” Jeff Esposito
4:19 pm on August 26th, 2008
Cheap, fast, reliable. Choose two.
8:53 pm on August 26th, 2008
“To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.”
I have no idea who coined that, but its definitely my favorite quote of all time.
1:20 am on August 28th, 2008
I think there’s a mistake in the first one.
The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 10 percent of the development time…
3:45 am on August 29th, 2008
“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.”
I dont think there’s a mistake with this one, it actually means that u’ll go over time by 80 percent
3:47 am on August 29th, 2008
“Removing the copy-paste function from all major IDEs would spare the humanity from 90% of all bugs in computer software.”
Can’ t remember where i read it. :/
And no, there is no mistake in the first one, it implies that software projects never finish on time therefore taking 180% time.
4:06 am on August 29th, 2008
adam:
The time after the first 100% is when you’ve passed the first deadline.
6:33 am on August 29th, 2008
My fave is the Larry Wall “three virtues” quote.
BTW Adam, you’ve totally missed the joke.
8:49 am on August 29th, 2008
“Programming is like sex — one mistake and you end up supporting it for the rest of your life.”
10:00 am on August 29th, 2008
Oh gods, don’t any of you understand that the 90% 90% quote means that you will always use more time than you planned?
10:51 am on August 29th, 2008
People… Cargill’s quote is supposed to be funny, not a literal calculation of project time.
11:09 am on August 29th, 2008
“A programmer spends 50% of his time fixing bugs, and the other 50% creating them.”
- Chris McGrath
7:31 pm on August 29th, 2008
Calvin, your recursion quote is my least favourite ;)
It makes me angry since it is clearly an example of an infinite loop rather than recursion.
12:22 pm on September 4th, 2008
Very nice. I love it. Just stumbleUpon it. I used to be a programmer now I dunno why I hate it. Please advise me how can I get back to coding program. I think my programming skill just suck big time after not having touched it for almost 3 years but I know that programming is such a headache. But it is actually a form of art with a creative mind blended together. To be brutal honest programming makes me so fustrated after all the debugging code when I used to be a newbie programmer.
9:18 am on September 5th, 2008
If programmers would spend as much time programming as they do coming up with cleaver quotes… hmmm, I guess we’d still be in a mess. :)
10:37 am on September 5th, 2008
God’s a great programmer, but a lousy debugger.
2:58 pm on September 5th, 2008
Great collection, personally i like this phase “Software and cathedrals are much the same - first we build them, then we pray.” as a programmer, i dont think this is totally ture but sometimes i do pray after implementation. LOL.
11:41 am on September 6th, 2008
All the quotes are nice !
1:27 pm on September 8th, 2008
The art of programming is finding patterns where others see only chaos -Me
6:54 am on September 9th, 2008
Really great collection!
I’m gonna share it with my colleagues.
Many of them are absolutely true.
Ciao!
11:30 pm on September 10th, 2008
>>BTW Adam, you’ve totally missed the joke.
You know why he is a manager now!!
11:43 am on September 15th, 2008
>>Alejandro Alvarez wrote:
>>”But yet again, what would be programming if we did the code perfect the first time?
There would be no “lovely” debugging, or no thinking over and over the same thing, just to find a misplaced ;”
As a beginning programmer, I totally agree and identify with this…many is the time I’ve sat there thinking about why my code didn’t work, when I end up realizing there’s that errant little semicolon at the end of a line where it doesn’t belong.
>>Jan Wedekind wrote:
>>”Cheap, fast, reliable. Choose two.”
Actually, while this quote is mostly true, and quite hilarious, on a more serious note, ‘Cheap, Fast and Reliable,’ are actually three adjectives I could easily use to describe Ubuntu Linux. But then again, I’m in love with Linux for the same reasons I despise Win(blows): Security, browser speed and source code availability. ;-) Granted, not all my favorite Windows games and programs have been recreated or ported to Linux–Sims 2 for example, but by Goddess I ADORE open-source programming, so if I want to play Sims 2–I just go play it on Playstation 2. ;-)