Favorite Programming Quotes

17
Aug
53

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

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Filed under: Programming, Rant, TechKnow
53 Comments

53 Comments

  1. Leif Thande
    2:58 pm on August 17th, 2008

    Edsger Dijkstra’s quote is there twice, so is the “do it over” quote.

  2. TechKnow
    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.

  3. vishwajeet singh
    2:46 am on August 18th, 2008

    Nice collection :)

  4. Ignacio Coloma
    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”

  5. Per Trangbæk
    12:47 pm on August 18th, 2008

    “life is just another example of bad programming”

  6. Robert
    7:39 pm on August 18th, 2008

    One from Martin Fowler - “The opposite of a testable design is a detestable design”

  7. Ashley
    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.

  8. Paul
    2:38 pm on August 19th, 2008

    “measure twice, cut once” - steve mconnel

  9. Saul Pwanson
    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)

  10. Asterisk IP telephony
    8:45 am on August 20th, 2008

    Great collection.
    A bug always lies in the programmer eyes :)

  11. Internetbug
    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.

  12. Phil Cassel
    2:44 pm on August 20th, 2008

    “The only time I was wrong was when I thought I was wrong.”

  13. adam
    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!!

  14. Rasputin
    4:00 am on August 21st, 2008

    Now adam is the moron…

  15. Edoardo
    4:08 pm on August 22nd, 2008

    What about the good old one:

    “God is Real, unless declared Integer”

  16. web design company
    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

  17. Tester
    8:02 am on August 23rd, 2008

    Quality Engineers pride themselves on professional paranoia.

  18. Alejandro U. Alvarez
    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

  19. JR
    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

  20. Jan Wedekind
    4:19 pm on August 26th, 2008

    Cheap, fast, reliable. Choose two.

  21. Calvin
    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.

  22. Kamal
    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…

  23. oz
    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

  24. Crazy Ivan
    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.

  25. creaothceann
    4:06 am on August 29th, 2008

    adam:
    The time after the first 100% is when you’ve passed the first deadline.

  26. Matt
    6:33 am on August 29th, 2008

    My fave is the Larry Wall “three virtues” quote.

    BTW Adam, you’ve totally missed the joke.

  27. Anon
    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.”

  28. BioTronic
    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?

  29. josh
    10:51 am on August 29th, 2008

    People… Cargill’s quote is supposed to be funny, not a literal calculation of project time.

  30. Gunner
    11:09 am on August 29th, 2008

    “A programmer spends 50% of his time fixing bugs, and the other 50% creating them.”

    - Chris McGrath

  31. Dan
    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.

  32. ohiit
    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.

  33. swampsparrow
    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. :)

  34. Cyril Gupta
    10:37 am on September 5th, 2008

    God’s a great programmer, but a lousy debugger.

  35. quantcoder
    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.

  36. Vijay Dev
    11:41 am on September 6th, 2008

    All the quotes are nice !

  37. Eric Filson
    1:27 pm on September 8th, 2008

    The art of programming is finding patterns where others see only chaos -Me

  38. Roberto
    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!

  39. anonymous
    11:30 pm on September 10th, 2008

    >>BTW Adam, you’ve totally missed the joke.
    You know why he is a manager now!!

  40. Kat
    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. ;-)

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