301 Quotes About Programming

For all the robots who question their programming.

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering.

Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.

Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential.

The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.

So if you want to go fast, if you want to get done quickly, if you want your code to be easy to write, make it easy to read.

How can we make sure we wind up behind the right door when the going gets tough? The answer is: craftsmanship.