KYRIAKOS ANASTASAKIS – ΚΥΡΙΑΚΟΣ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗΣ Blog

I have received an Email with the top 50 programming quotes. Here are my favourites:

• “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.” – Rick Cook
• “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” – Edward V. Berard
• “They don’t make bugs like Bunny anymore.” – Olav Mjelde
• “A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors.” – Waldi Ravens
• I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
• “In the one and only true way, the object-oriented version of ‘Spaghetti code’ is, of course, ‘Lasagna code’ (too many layers).” – Roberto Waltman
• “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.” – Bill Bryson
• “Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.” – Thomas C. Gale
• “Perfection [in design] is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupry
• “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.” – Randall E. Stross
• “To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” – L. Peter Deutsch
• “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” – Seymour Cray
• “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.” -Linus Torvalds

And my favourites:

• “You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.” – Jim McCarthy
• “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.” – Donald E. Knuth
• “Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Christopher Thompson
• “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.” – George Carrette
• “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
• “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding
• “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

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
> build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to
> build bigger and better idiots.
> So far, the universe is winning." - Rick Cook