Marijn Haverbeke Quotes & Sayings

Programming, it turns out, is hard. The fundamental rules are typically simple and clear. But programs built on top of these rules tend to become complex enough to introduce their own rules and complexity. You're building your own maze, in a way, and you might just get lost in it. — Marijn Haverbeke

Learning is hard work, but everything you learn is yours and will make subsequent learning easier. — Marijn Haverbeke

You should imagine variables as tentacles, rather than boxes. They do not contain values; they grasp them - two variables can refer to the same value. — Marijn Haverbeke

Higher-order functions allow us to abstract over actions, not just values. — Marijn Haverbeke

a detailed low-level one for complex situations and a simple high-level one for routine use. The second can usually be built easily using the tools provided by the first. In — Marijn Haverbeke

Functions that create values are easier to combine in new ways than functions that directly perform side effects — Marijn Haverbeke

The art of programming is the skill of controlling complexity. — Marijn Haverbeke

It helps omit uninteresting details, provides convenient building blocks (such as while and console.log), allows you to define your own building blocks (such as sum and range), and makes those blocks easy to compose. — Marijn Haverbeke

The programmer who refuses to keep exploring will surely stagnate, forget his joy, lose the will to program (and become a manager). — Marijn Haverbeke

most obvious application of functions is defining new vocabulary. Creating new words in regular, human-language prose is usually bad style. But in programming, it is indispensable. — Marijn Haverbeke

It also makes the program more difficult to change because prose tends to be more tightly interconnected than code. This style is called literate programming. The — Marijn Haverbeke

The best way to learn the value of good interface design is to use lots of interfaces - some good, some bad. Experience will teach you what works and what doesn't. Never assume that a painful interface is "just the way it is." Fix it, or wrap it in — Marijn Haverbeke

It has to become second nature, for a programmer, to notice when a concept is begging to be abstracted into a new word. — Marijn Haverbeke

In the happy land of elegant code and pretty rainbows, there lives a spoil-sport monster called inefficiency. — Marijn Haverbeke

How difficult it is to find a good name for a function is a good indication of how clear a concept it is that — Marijn Haverbeke