Quotation

gistfile1.txt

God is looking for people with whom He can do the impossible -
what a pity we plan only the things we can do ourselves.

        A. W. Tozer
        
Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn't have in your home.

        David Frost

quotation

6.   Symmetry is a complexity reducing concept (co-routines include sub-routines); seek it everywhere.
10.  Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize.
58.  Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
121. In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.

        - Alan J. Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
          (http://web.archive.org/web/19990117034445/http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/klaeren/epigrams.html)


If you can't write it down in English, you can't code it.

        - Peter Halpern


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.

Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs,
but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull.
He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

        — Edsger W. Dijkstra


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

        — Richard Feynman


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

        — Sean Parent


As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used,
and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

        — Dave Parnas


So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.

        — Ryan Singer


If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day;
if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.

        — David Leinweber (NOWS)


You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

        — Ken Thompson

In the old days, programmers spent hours and days and weeks working very hard, and sometimes brilliantly, on difficult things that no one had ever done before.

These days, programmers spend hours and days and weeks working very hard, and usually unsatisfactorily, on getting around bugs in their platform.

        — Brent Simmons [inessential.com]


I remarked to Dennis [Ritchie] that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code.
He said, “We left all that stuff out [of Unix]. If there’s an error, we have this routine called panic,
and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, ‘Hey, reboot it.’”

        — Tom Van Vleck [http://www.multicians.org/unix.html]
          (see also: http://doc.cat-v.org/programming/worse_is_better)


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 W. Dijkstra

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

        — Bill Gates
        

"Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning."

        — Unknown


For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten.
We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here

        - Linus Torvalds, on the compiler


1. Pick your ingredients very carefully
2. Home-made first
3. A flashy presentation won’t save a poor dish.

        - Eugénie Brazier

When did I say this? Not saying I didn't... just don't remember. I haven't been a programmer since the 80's-90's.

It's in More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder