46 Quotes by Brian Kernighan

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

An effective way to test code is to exercise it at its natural boundaries

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

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

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

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.

If you had done something twice, you are likely to do it again.

Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)