Quotes on Programming

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call elegance - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

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

Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

The universe is already programmed to give each of us a year of happiness. Our challenge lies in programming ourselves to receive it.

I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another.

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.

Careful as they may be, developers of Eiffel libraries will always run into cases in which, after releasing a library class, they suddenly experience what in French is called esprit de l'escalier or wit of the staircase: a great thought which unfortunately is an afterthought, like a clever reply that would have stunned all the other dinner guests - if only you had thought of it before walking down the stairs after the party is over.

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

Culture is your operating system.

For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.

It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.

JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language.

Complexity has and will maintain a strong fascination for many people. It is true that we live in a complex world and strive to solve inherently complex problems, which often do require complex mechanisms. However, this should not diminish our desire for elegant solutions, which convince by their clarity and effectiveness. Simple, elegant solutions are more effective, but they are harder to find than complex ones, and they require more time, which we too often believe to be unaffordable

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.