Quotes List

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent.

— Edsger Dijkstra

You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time.

— Bertrand Meyer

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

— John Steinbeck

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 Dijkstra

Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.

— Henry Spencer

I think conventional languages are for the birds. They're just extensions of the von Neumann computer, and they keep our noses in the dirt of dealing with individual words and computing addresses, and doing all kinds of silly things like that, things that we've picked up from programming for computers; we've built them into programming languages; we've built them into Fortran; we've built them in PL/1; we've built them into almost every language.

— John Backus

Get and set methods are evil.

— Allen Holub

Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing.

— Gerald Weinberg

Part of the reason so many companies continue to develop software using variations of waterfall is the misconception that the analysis phase of waterfall completes the design and the rest of the process is just non-creative execution of programming skills.

— Steven Gordon

If the programmer can simulate a construct faster than a compiler can implement the construct itself, then the compiler writer has blown it badly.

— Guy Steele