Programming Languages Quotes

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  • A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

  • The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

    Teacher   Truth   Science  
    "Reasons to De-Test the Schools". The New York Times, October 11, 1988.
  • There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

  • That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted.

    George Boole (1854). “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought: On which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities”, p.24
  • The discipline of programming is most like sorcery. Both use precise language to instruct inanimate objects to do our bidding. Small mistakes in programs or spells can lead to completely unforseen behavior: e.g., see the story, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Neither study is easy: "...her [Galinda's] early appetite for sorcery had waned once she'd heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them." from the book "Wicked" by G. Maguire.

    Mistake   Book   Learning  
  • The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.

  • Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

    People   Style   Looks  
    "The Awakening of Global Consciousness: A Guide to Self-Realization and Spirituality". Book by Jawara D. King, 2010.
  • The best is the enemy of the good.

    Letter to Duc de Richelieu, 18 June 1744. Although this saying is now associated with Voltaire, he is obviously quoting an Italian proverb here. The French form, which he used later, is Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
  • When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

    "The Universal Book of Mathematics". Book by David Darling, p. 34, November 8, 2004.
  • If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you're a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it's much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people - because a machine doesn't get sleepy.

    Running   Morning   Wall  
  • One purpose of CRC cards [a design tool] is to fail early, to fail often, and to fail inexpensively. It is a lot cheaper to tear up a bunch of cards that it would be to reorganize a large amount of source code.

    Learning   Design   Tears  
  • Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

    Roots   Evil   Simplicity  
  • Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

    David Hillel Gelernter (1998). “Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology”, Basic Books (AZ)
  • The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

    Media   Creating   Air  
    "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Book by Fred Brooks, 1975.
  • One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.

  • The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.

    Self   Hands   Smell  
    Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant (2004). “Programming Perl: 3rd Edition”, p.4, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
  • I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

    Lecture titled "The Design and Use of the EDSAC" delivered by Maurice Wilkes at the Digital Computer Museum, tcm.computerhistory.org. September 23, 1979.
  • A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

    "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas". Book by Seymour Papert, 1980.
  • 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.

  • A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

    1987 Address at Trinity College, Washington. Reported in Time, 22 Jun.
  • An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.

    Dr. John W. Gardner (2015). “Excellence: Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?”, p.97, Pickle Partners Publishing
  • More than the act of testing, the act of designing tests is one of the best bug preventers known.

    Design   Tests   Bugs  
    Boris Beizer (1990). “Software Testing Techniques”, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company
  • A class, in Java, is where we teach objects how to behave.

    Learning   Class   Java  
  • The greatest single programming language ever designed

  • The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

    "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" by Edsger Dijkstra, June 18, 1975.
  • Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

    Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1976). “A Discipline of Programming”, Prentice Hall
  • There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

    Writing   Errors   Two  
    "Epigrams on Programming". ACM "SIGPLAN" Notices 17 (9), (pp. 7-13), September 1982.
  • In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

    "Epigrams on Programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), pp. 7-13, pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de. September 1982.
  • The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

  • I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination.

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