Quotes & Sayings About C Programming

The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central. — Dennis Ritchie

My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects. — Richard Stallman

If the discipline of requirements specification has taught us anything, it is that well-specified requirements are as formal as code and can act as executable tests of that code! — Robert C. Martin

Now, it's my belief that Python is a lot easier than to teach to students programming and teach them C or C++ or Java at the same time because all the details of the languages are so much harder. Other scripting languages really don't work very well there either. — Guido Van Rossum

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs. — Linus Torvalds

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made — Robert C. Martin

Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming." — J. C. R. Licklider

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. — Alan Kay

A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment. — Robert C. Martin

Redundant comments are just places to collect lies and misinformation. — Robert C. Martin

I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options. — J. C. Watts

Legacy code. The phrase strikes disgust in the hearts of programmers. It conjures images of slogging through a murky swamp of tangled undergrowth with leaches beneath and stinging flies above. It conjures odors of murk, slime, stagnancy, and offal. Although our first joy of programming may have been intense, the misery of dealing with legacy code is often sufficient to extinguish that flame. — Michael C. Feathers

Floating in the tank after a busy day's work brings a great relief. Suddenly all of the stimulation of holding one upright against gravity disappears. One realizes that a good deal of the fatigue accumulated during the day is caused by keeping one's body upright in a gravitational field. From a neurophysiological standpoint, one has immediately freed up very large masses of neurons from the necessity of constant computations (as to the direction of gravity, the programming by visual and acoustic inputs, by temperature changes, etcetera). For example, one's cerebellum is now freed for uses other than balancing the body. In summary, then, — John C. Lilly

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavian. — Robin Sloan

The keyword const doesn't turn a variable into a constant! A symbol with the const qualifier merely means that the symbol cannot be used for assignment. This makes the value read-only through that symbol ; it does not prevent the value from being modified through some other means internal (or even external) to the program. — Peter Van Der Linden

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location. — Jerry Pournelle

My particular interest for the past couple of years has been to really think deeply about the big impendence mismatch we have between programming languages, C# in particular, and the database world, like SQL or, for that matter, the XML world, like XQuery and those languages that exist. — Anders Hejlsberg

The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user. — C.A.R. Hoare

And C++ programming languages, we own those, have licensed them out multiple times, obviously. We have a lot of royalties coming to us from C++. — Darl McBride

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write. — Robert C. Martin

C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge. — Herbert Schildt

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people. — Robert C. Martin

Truth can only be found in one place: the code. — Robert C. Martin

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. — Robert C. Martin

From the perspective of a class C, an alien method is one whose behavior is not fully specified by C. This includes methods in other classes as well as overrideable methods (neither private nor final) in C itself. Passing an object to an alien method must also be considered publishing that object. Since you can't know what code will actually be invoked, you don't know that the alien method won't publish the object or retain a reference to it that might later be used from another thread. — Brian Goetz

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well. — Bertrand Meyer

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. — Robert C. Martin

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard
for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance
close to optimal so as not to tempt
people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well.

-Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++
and author of The C++ Programming
Language — Robert C. Martin

When the ANSI C standard was under development, the pragma directive was introduced. Borrowed from Ada, #pragma is used to convey hints to the compiler, such as the desire to expand a particular function in-line or suppress range checks. Not previously seen in C, pragma met with some initial resistance from a gcc implementor, who took the "implementation-defined" effect very literally - in gcc version 1.34, the use of pragma causes the compiler to stop compiling and launch a computer game instead! The gcc manual contained the following: The "#pragma" command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, "#pragma" first attempts to run the game "rogue"; if that fails, it tries to run the game "hack"; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue. - Manual for version 1.34 of the GNU C compiler — Peter Van Der Linden

I was in Washington, D.C., on the morning show, by the time I was 18, programming a station by 19, No. 1 in the mornings. I think I was making, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars by the time I was 25. — Glenn Beck

C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli. — Damian Conway

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. — Philip Greenspun

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. — Michael C. Feathers

Generative testing is an approach to testing software that was made popular by the QuickCheck library. Originally written in Haskell and since ported to several other programming languages (Ruby, Python, C, C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Java, JavaScript, Erlang, Scala, Clojure...), the QuickCheck library allows the developer to separate test logic from the generation of test cases. This means that, as developers, we can spend less time instructing the compiler how to test our code, and focus instead on what properties we expect our code to have. — Anonymous

The LSP makes clear that in OOD the ISA relationship pertains to behavior. Not intrinsic private behavior, but extrinsic public behavior; behavior that clients depend upon. — Robert C. Martin

Programming is the art of doing one thing at a time — Michael C. Feathers

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. — Robert C. Martin

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

Q: Why bother doing proofs about programming languages? They are almost always boring if the definitions are right.
A: The definitions are almost always wrong.

- Anonymous — Benjamin C. Pierce

Programming is a social activity. — Robert C. Martin

Larry Wall's classic Programming Perl described the three programmer's virtues: hubris, laziness, and impatience. — C.J.S. Hayward

I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Javawere created for other people to use. If you think you're designing
something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots. — Paul Graham

My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes. — Bram Cohen