Clever Programming Quotes
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 -- 9:02 amLast night Lucas and I ordered a new laptop for me, and one of the semi-cool features is that it can be engraved. This was too good an opportunity to pass up. I nixed Lucas’s original suggestion of
Meg Natraj
www.MegDesk.com
hoping instead to find a clever and appropriate quotation to carve onto the machine. We spent over an hour reading a variety of computer and technology quotations before settling on Douglas Adams’ simple “Don’t Panic!” With the power of the internet behind it, this would be my own shiny new Hitchiker’s Guide! Unfortunately, Sony didn’t allow apostrophes (which seems foolish, since it also blocks the presumably-popular “John’s Computer” type of message). The runner-up was a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, who passed away earlier this year: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We started typing it into the engraving field, and that was when we realized that we were limited to only about 25 characters per line. Oops. The moral of this story is clearly to check the limitations first! In the end I opted for:
Meg Natraj
www.MegDesk.com
However, the search wasn’t a complete waste of time, because we did stumble onto some really fantastic quotations, many of which are well worth sharing. We enjoyed two lists in particular, 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes and 101 More Great Computer Programming Quotes. Some of them we’d seen before, and some of them are so-so, but many of them are quite clever or insightful and previously unknown to us (though admittedly we don’t spend a lot of time browsing the web for clever programming comments).
If you are a programmer, I urge you to read the entire lists (if you pick just one, I think the “More” list is better), but here is a random assortment that I feel like copying:
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.”
- Eric Raymond
There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.
- Bjarne Stroustrup
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are – by definition – not smart enough to debug it.
- Brian Kernighan
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
- Martin Golding
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
- Nathaniel S. Borenstein
It’s OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn’t need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
- Steve McConnell
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- Charles Babbage
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
- Richard Moore
It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!
- Mark Andreesen, speaking of the HTML tag BLINK
Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
- Keith Bostic
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
- Stephen Hawking
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
- Stephen Hawking
Those last two inspired us to go look up more Stephen Hawking quotes. This confirmed the opinion I formed after hearing him lecture in Beijing. In addition to being brilliant, he’s a surprisingly funny guy!
June 25th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Those _are_ good. I think I like the perl one the most.
Arthur C Clarke’s 3rd law is in my email sig at work.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Great post. Did you notice the quote by our own Gene Spafford?
“The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.”
June 26th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I did notice that one, but I felt that if I included it in the condensed list, people would think that I was playing favorites.
Although I did choose Eric S. Raymond’s over the similar ones, mostly because I thought it was a nice analogy, but partly because ESR amuses me. I actually met him once. It was a little creepy, because I was wearing a short dress, and I think he was checking me out.