Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
— Abelson and Sussman, SICP
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked and science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?
All programming is an exercise in caching
— Black Art of Game Programming book, by Michael Abrash
The code says everything once and only once, which is the essence of good design.
— Martin Fowler
I often feel that creating software is like mixing cement. It starts out soft and hardens over time as you stir it.
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
— Alan Perlis
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. The first method is far more difficult.
— Tony Hoare
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
To offer a third analogy, a folk definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and to expect the results to be different. By this definition, we in fact require that programmers of multithreaded systems be insane. Were they sane, they could not understand their programs.
— The Problem with Threads
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like
measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
— William Gates
