An assortment of quotes mostly related to software development

Developer Quotes

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
	- Pablo Picasso

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

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

Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance.
	- Jon Franklin

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
	- Hans Hoffmann

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
	- Leonardo da Vinci

... 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

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability
	- Edsger W.Dijkstra

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

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 Dijkstra

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

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

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

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

...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 Brook [paraphrased] as quoted from Allen Holub's 

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.
	- W. Edwards Deming

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

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

C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.
	- Damian Conway

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

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

Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
	- Fred Brooks

Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow.
	- Fred Brooks

If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two.
	- Craig Zerouni

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

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

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

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

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 to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
	- Donald Knuth
	
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
	- Donald Knuth

Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don't do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet.
	- M.A. Jackson

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

Be careful about using the following code -- I've only proven that it works, I haven't tested it.
	- Donald Knuth

You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything.
	- Donald Knuth

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

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

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

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

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
	- Ralph Johnson
	
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
	- Bill Gates
	
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
	
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
	
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
	
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
	
If you want a product with certain characteristics, you must ensure that the team has those characteristics before the product's development.
	- Jim and Michele McCarthy - Software for your Head

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

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

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

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

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

The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state
	- John Ousterhout

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

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users".
	- Edward Tufte
	
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works.
	- Alan J. Perlis

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

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
	- L. Peter Deutsch

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
	- attributed to Norm Schryer

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

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

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

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

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
 	- Martin Golding

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

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*.
	- R. A. Heinlein

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.
	- Anon

UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.
	- Dennis Ritchie

Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater.
	- Einstein

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.
	- Einstein
	
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, Jr.

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

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
	- Flannery O'Connor

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