Programming Quotations

A

• If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

  Catherine Aird

• All software can be made at least one line shorter and has at least one bug, so all software can be reduced to a single line of code that doesn't work.

  Anon

• And the users exclaimed with a laugh and a taunt: "It's just what we asked for but not what we want."

  Anon

• I really hate this damned machine
  I wish that they would sell it.
  It never does quite what I want
  But only what I tell it.
  

  Anon

• If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

  Anon

• Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O.

  Anon

• Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

  Anon

• The Six Phases of a Project:
  • Enthusiasm
  • Disillusionment
  • Panic
  • Search for the Guilty
  • Punishment of the Innocent
  • Praise for non-participants

  Anon

• Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why.
  Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.

  Anon

• There are 10 kinds of people in this world....Those who understand binary and those who don't.

  Anon

• The best method for accelerating a computer is the one that boosts it by 9.8 m/s²

  Anon

• It's not reality's job to satisfy our egos

  Anon

• If there's one thing worse than a program that doesn't work when it should, it's a program that does work when it shouldn't.

  Bob Archer

• There's a fine line between being on the leading edge and being in the lunatic fringe.

  Frank Armstrong

B

• Sometimes the problem has to mature before the solution can mature.

  Kent Beck

• Once a new technology starts rolling, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

  Stewart Brand

• Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

  Fred Brooks

• Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

  Fred Brooks

• Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow.

  Fred Brooks

• ...well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you -- if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers -- the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.

  Fred Brooks [paraphrased] as quoted from Allen Holub's http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-1999/jw-07-toolbox.html

• The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple.

  John Brown

C

• The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

  Tom Cargill

• ... the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

  John Carmack

• Trying to get into the details seems to be a religious issue -- nearly everybody is convinced that every style but their own is ugly and unreadable. Leave out the "but their own" and they're probably right...

  Jerry Coffin on indentation

• The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

  Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics

• C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.

  Damian Conway

• Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. (For example, if you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler)

  Conway's Law

• Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.

  Rich Cook

• It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

  Alan Cooper About Face

• Style distinguishes excellence from accomplishment.

  James Coplien

• The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

  Robert R. Coveyou

• The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

  Seymour Cray

• If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.

  Robert Cringely

D

• Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

  W. Edwards Deming

• To iterate is human, to recurse divine.

  L. Peter Deutsch

• Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it.

  Norman Diamond

• A most important, but also most elusive, aspect of any tool is its influence on the habits of those who train themselves in its use. If the tool is a programming language this influence is, whether we like it or not, an influence on our thinking habits.

  Edsger W. Dijkstra

• It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to Basic; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

  Edsger W. Dijkstra

• Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability

  Edsger W. Dijkstra

• The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

  Edsger Dijkstra

• Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

  Edsger W. Dijkstra

• With diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly

  Tom Duff

E

• Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

  Eagleson's law

• Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater.

  Albert Einstein

• Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

  Albert Einstein

• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

  Albert Einstein

• Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

  Albert Einstein

• We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

  Albert Einstein

• I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

  Dwight Eisenhower

• A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

F

• For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.

  Richard Feynman

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.

  Richard Feynman

• The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!

  Richard Feynman

• You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

  Richard Feynman

• Progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory

  Richard Feynman

• One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

  Robert Firth

• There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.

  Flon's Law

• People have said you don't understand something until you've taught it in a class. The truth is you don't understand something until you've taught it to a computer, until you've been able to program it.

  George Forsythe

• Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers.

  Martin Fowler

• When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

  Martin Fowler Refactoring

• Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance.

  Jon Franklin

G

• If you want a girlfriend, avoid working in the computer games industry like the plague. If you work seven days a week, 15 hours a day for almost two years, with barely enough time for a pint, you have no time whatsoever for relationships. Plus computer-games makers are regarded as being about as hip and cool as abattoir workers.

  Toby Gard, creator of Lara Croft.

• Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

  Bill Gates

• Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case.

  Francis Glassborow

• Don't get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system – it lacks a good editor, though.

  Thomer M. Gil

• Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.

  Larry Gleason

• The devil doesn't need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics.

  Seth Godin

• The key to getting a reputation for being brilliant is actually being brilliant, not just acting like you are.

  Seth Godin

• Developers, developers, developers. Apple hates developers, developers, developers.

  Kevin Goldsmith

• An API that isn't comprehensible isn't usable.

  James Gosling

• As technologies improve, each generation can do things that the previous generation would have considered wasteful. People thirty years ago would be astonished at how casually we make long distance phone calls. People a hundred years ago would be even more astonished that a package would one day travel from Boston to New York via Memphis.

  Paul Graham

H

• A type system is the most cost effective unit test you'll ever have.

  Peter Hallam

• How the teacher reacts when something goes wrong tells the class what's important.

  Bruce Hamilton

• Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

  Hanlon's razor

• The road to wisdom?
  Well its plain and simple to express:
  Err and err and err again,
  but less and less and less.

  Piet Hein

• Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

  Robert A. Heinlein

• There are perhaps 5% of the population that simply *can't* think.
  There are another 5% who *can*, and *do*.
  The remaining 90% *can* think, but *don't*.
  

  Robert A. Heinlein

• The open secrets of good design practice include the importance of knowing what to keep whole, what to combine, what to separate, and what to throw away.

  Kevlin Henny

• We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth.... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.

  Patrick Henry

• There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

  C.A.R. Hoare

• The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

  C.A.R. Hoare

• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

  Hans Hoffmann

• It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

  Hofstadter's Law

• It's not at all important to get it right the first time. It's vitally important to get it right the last time.

  Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

• Quality is a team issue.

  Andrew Hunt and David ThomasThe Pragmatic Programmer

J

• Rules of Optimization:
  Rule 1: Don't do it.
  Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
  

  M.A. Jackson

• Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.

  Ralph Johnson

• First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.

  John Johnson

K

• It's so easy to become mesmerized by the immediacy of a result that you don't question its validity.

  Naomi Karten

• Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

  Alan Kay

• Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

  Alan Kay

• We are faced with an insurmountable opportunity.

  W. Kelley

• Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

  Stan Kelly-Bootle

• 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

• Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with.

  Brian W. Kernighan from his lecture Elements of Programming Style

• Believe the terrain, not the map.

  Brian W. Kernighan from his lecture Elements of Programming Style

• As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

  Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, C Programming Language (2nd Edition)

• Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one.

  Kernighan and Plauger, The Elements of Programming Style.

• A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

  Hugh Kingsmill

• ... the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. ... If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

  Donald Knuth

• Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

  Donald Knuth, Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3: Sorting and Searching (2nd Edition)

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

  Donald Knuth

• Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

  Donald Knuth

• Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

  Donald Knuth

• TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler.

  Donald Knuth

• The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

  Donald Knuth

• These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

  Donald Knuth

• We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

  Donald Knuth

• You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.

  Donald Knuth

• Who are you? How did you get in my house?

  Donald Knuth quoted at http://xkcd.com/163/

• Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.

  Kreitzberg and Shneiderman

L

• A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.

  Leslie Lamport

• The perfect project plan is possible if one first documents a list of all the unknowns.

  Bill Langley

• Without stress nothing would move.

  Bill Langley

• But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses.

  Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

M

• There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new...

  Niccolo Macchiavelli, The Prince

• The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code.

  Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

• If you want a product with certain characteristics, you must ensure that the team has those characteristics before the product's development.

  Jim McCarthy and Michele McCarthy - Software for your Head

• You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.

  Jim McCarthy

• 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.

  Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

• It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

  Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

• Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.

  Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

• Incompetents invariably make trouble for people other than themselves.

  Larry McMurtry

• For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

  H L Mencken

• Haste is of the devil. Slowness is of God.

  H L Mencken

• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

  H. L. Mencken

• Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.

  Bertrand Meyer

• Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.

  Bertrand Meyer

• ... constants are widely known for the detestable practice of changing their values; we should prepare ourselves against the consequences of such fickleness.

  Bertrand Meyer

• A non-virtual function says, you have to do this and you must do it this way. A virtual function says you have to do this, but you don't have to do it this way. That's their fundamental difference.

  Scott Meyers

• Debugging a Direct3D application can be challenging.

  Microsoft's Direct3D Immediate Mode overview.

• Software sucks because users demand it to.

  Nathan Myhrvold

N

• Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary.

  Erik Naggum

• Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

  Ted Nelson

• Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.

  John von Neumann

• There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about.

  John von Neumann

• That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

  Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Oath of Fealty

O

• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

  Flannery O'Connor

• Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees.

  David Ogilvy

• Elegance is not optional

  Richard O'Keefe

• The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state

  John Ousterhout

• Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.

  Ray Ozzie

P

• Good code is short, simple, and symmetrical - the challenge is figuring out how to get there.

  Sean Parent

• Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right.

  Bob Park

• Copy and paste is a design error

  David Parnas

• If you make a study of failure cases, you will less likely be the subject of one.

  Mike Perkins

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

  Alan J. Perlis

• There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.

  Alan J. Perlis

• When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.

  Alan Perlis

• Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

  Laurence J. Peter

• The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.

  Henry Petroski

• A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

  Emo Philips

• Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

  Pablo Picasso

• Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.

  Putt's Law

R

• A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

  Mitche Ratcliffe

• Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

  Eric S. Raymond

• PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

  Jon Ribbens

• UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.

  Dennis Ritchie

• We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

  La Rochefoucauld

• Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

  Will Rogers

• Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

  Bertrand Russell

• A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

  Alfréd Rényi (also attributed to Paul Erdös)

S

• You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars

• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

  George Santayana

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

• If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

  attributed to Norm Schryer

• If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.

  William Shakespeare Macbeth

• Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

  G.B. Shaw

• Putting a good comment on bad code does not redeem the bad code.

  Shawn Sheridan

• The only sin is to make a choice without knowing you are making one.

  Jonathan Shewchuk

• It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

  Upton Sinclair

• When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have been committed in the name of rebellion.

  C.P. Snow

• It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble amd know that you yourself and no one else has made it.

  Sophocles Ajax

• When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect ?

  Thomas Sowell

• If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.

  Henry Spencer

• Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.

  Louis Srygley

• The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong.

  Verity Stob

• We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

  Tom Stoppard

• A notation is important for what it leaves out.

  Joseph Stoy

• An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

  Bjarne Stroustrup

• I did say something along the lines of "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off."

  Bjarne Stroustrup

• I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

  Bjarne Stroustrup

• The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.

  Bjarne Stroustrup

• To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit.

  Bjarne Stroustrup The C++ Programming Language 3e, section 24.2.4

• Exceptions relieve the programmer of tedious writing boilerplate code -- without removing the semantics of said code -- and they allow the programmer to arrange the code so that error handling code is more separate from the main program logic.

  Herb Sutter

• Observe the canonical exception-safety rules: In each function, take all the code that might emit a exception and do all that work safely off to the side. Only then, when you know that the real work has succeeded, should you modify the program state (and clean up) using only non-throwing operations.

  Herb Sutter Exceptional C++

T

• A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack.

  Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum

• I've finally learned what "upward compatible" means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.

  Dennie van Tassel

• There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users".

  Edward Tufte

U

• Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.

  Rep. Morris Udall

V

• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

  Leonardo da Vinci

• The best is the enemy of the good.

  Voltaire

W

• Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

  Larry Wall

• We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

  Larry Wall

• Power is the ability to control things, moral authority is the ability to change things

  Jim Wallis

• When one is postulating correlations or causations extant in reality, one should always remember that the human brain is mainly a pattern recognition engine. And it is such a persistent pattern recognition engine that it often perceives patterns where none exist.

  Jeff Walther

• The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

  William Arthur Ward

• They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

  Andy Warhol

• If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation.

  Gerald Weinberg

• Naturally we feel that mentally ill people are not what we are looking for when we hire programmers - although there is no empirical data to support or contradict that view...... Is it appropriate to give tests for mental illness to anyone applying for any kind of job?

  Weinberg The Psychology of Computer Programming

• When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing. Now, God only knows.

  Karl Weierstrass

• Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

  Alfred North Whitehead

• As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

  Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

• I bet you'll all think coding is pretty cool. That is, if you find two digit multi-stacked conversions and primary number crunching a big hoot.

  Willow

• Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling---the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.

  Niklaus Wirth

• Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Ni-klows Wirt'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nick-les Worth'. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.

  Niklaus Wirth

• Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

  Wirth's law

• The limits of language are the limits of one's world.

  Ludwig von Wittgenstein

• Code that isn't tested == code that is broken. (Corollary: Multi-threaded code that is tested != code that works)

  Wayne Wooten

• More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

  W.A. Wulf

Y

• If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave.

  Edward Yourdon Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer

Z

• The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.

  Dr. Pamela Zave

• Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

  Jamie Zawinski

• If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two.

  Craig Zerouni

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