Programming Code Quotes & Sayings

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

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code. — Dave Thomas

Her assignment had been to write a simple Sumerian code for preserving a jar of pickled eggs. (To the programming-inclined reader, this is the magical equivalent of "HELLO WORLD.") — Sorin Suciu

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

I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the way. Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers, except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to large organizations. Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way, and I expect this to be as true in a hundred years as it is today. — Paul Graham

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

Learning a language is not interesting than knowing how it works. — Ritesh Shrivastav

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job. — Michael Crichton

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

As an Agile software development team, we'd been following the hallowed eXtreme Programming tenets, including YAGNI. That is, You Aren't Gonna Need It: a caution to not write unnecessary code - — Anonymous

One IT executive in an investment banking company claimed that 80 percent of his company's programming code was dedicated to linking disparate systems, as opposed to creating new capabilities. — Jeanne W. Ross

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent". — Edsger Dijkstra

The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code, — Douglas McIlroy

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

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer. — Bill Gates

One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd. — Maureen F. McHugh

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

...I'm not saying simple code takes less time to write. You'd think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn't an accretion of code, it's a distillation of it. — Robert Nystrom

In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, "to be, or not to be, that is the question." In the 21st century, "to code, or not to code, that is the challenge. — Newton Lee

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

Think like a fundamentalist, code like a hacker. — Erik Meijer

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

First solve the problem. Then, write the code. — Waseem Latif

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

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

Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws. — Jonathan Zittrain

Debugging tip: For server applications, be sure to always specify the -server JVM command line switch when invoking the JVM, even for development and testing. The server JVM performs more optimization than the client JVM, such as hoisting variables out of a loop that are not modified in the loop; code that might appear to work in the development environment (client JVM) can break in the deployment environment (server JVM). — Brian Goetz

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

Don't gloss over a routine or piece of code involved in the bug because you "know" it works. Prove it. Prove it in this context, with this data, with these boundary conditions. — Andrew Hunt

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

Learning to code makes kids feel empowered, creative, and confident. If we want our young women to retain these traits into adulthood, a great option is to expose them to computer programming in their youth. — Susan Wojcicki

Writing code is not production, it's not always craftsmanship though it can be, it's design. — Joel Spolsky

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set? — Edsger Dijkstra

But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti. — Andrew Hunt

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. — Ellen Ullman

Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. — Paul Graham

She had a theory that the fear of getting in trouble was what made her not as good a programmer and that, in fact, it was all linked to testosterone, and that was why there were more guy programmers than women. It was a very hazy theory, and she didn't like it, but she had pretty much convinced herself it was true, although she couldn't bear to think of sharing it with anybody, because it was a lot better to think that there were social reasons why girls didn't usually become code monkeys than to think there were biological reasons. — Maureen F. McHugh

The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style. — Gary Kildall

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

Sometimes abstraction and encapsulation are at odds with performance - although not nearly as often as many developers believe - but it is always a good practice first to make your code right, and then make it fast. — Brian Goetz

Think twice, code once. — Waseem Latif

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

Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles ... they all sounded to me like extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly. — Joel Spolsky

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick — Charles Petzold

The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself. — Amari Cooper

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. — Linus Torvalds

Immutable objects are simple. They can only be in one state, which is carefully controlled by the constructor. One of the most difficult elements of program design is reasoning about the possible states of complex objects. Reasoning about the state of immutable objects, on the other hand, is trivial.

Immutable objects are also safer. Passing a mutable object to untrusted code, or otherwise publishing it where untrusted code could find it, is dangerous - the untrusted code might modify its state, or, worse, retain a reference to it and modify its state later from another thread. On the other hand, immutable objects cannot be subverted in this manner by malicious or buggy code, so they are safe to share and publish freely without the need to make defensive copies. — Brian Goetz

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. — Eric S. Raymond

Programming is a social activity. — Robert C. Martin

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology. — Charles Petzold

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

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. — Bill Gates

Creativity shouldn't be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn't be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other 'creative types.' The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y. — Jonah Lehrer