Quotes on Software Engineering

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed

One principle problem of educating software engineers is that they will not use a new method until they believe it works and, more importantly, that they will not believe the method will work until they see it for themselves.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

... programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time.

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.