301 Quotes About Programming

Think like a fundamentalist, code like a hacker.

Like so many things in software, MVC was invented by Smalltalkers in the seventies. Lispers probably claim they came up with it in the sixties but didn't bother writing it down.

Being able to extend jQuery, whether by adding your own functions, CSS selectors or full- blown plugins, makes you a much stronger and smarter developer.

Most non-programmers don't think of plaintext like that. To them, text files feel like filling in tax forms for an angry robotic auditor that yells at them if they forget a single semicolon.

I once generalized from a single data point, and I'll never do that again!

Code without tests is bad code. It doesn't matter how well written it is; it doesn't matter how pretty or object-oriented or well-encapsulated it is. With tests, we can change the behavior of our code quickly and verifiably. Without them, we really don't know if our code is getting better or worse.

If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger.

It is far easier to design a class to be thread-safe than to retrofit it for thread safety later.

Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make all fields final unless they need to be mutable.