What's your favourite quote about programming? [closed]

Question

What's your favourite quote about programming?

One quote per answer, and please check for duplicates before posting!

Answer 1

Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.

--Alan J. Perlis

Answer 2

Being able to get a machine to do what you want is the closest thing we've got in technology to adolescent wish-fulfillment.
  — Guy Steele in Coders at Work

Answer 3

COBOL can be cured if caught early.
-- From Programming classes

Answer 4

In C++ it’s harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg.
  — Bjarne Stroustrup

Answer 5

Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
  — Seymour Cray on virtual memory

Answer 6

What you are asking me to do is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It doesn't work.

Answer 7

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

proverb from japan

Answer 8

Knowledge is knowledge. And viceversa.

From a T-shirt.

Answer 9

A quote on recursion and programming in general I came up with today.

Only fools believe in foolproof systems.

Answer 10

I'm not sure if he's the originator of this quote, but I attended a session at a conference once where Alex Pukinskis said this and I love it!

Untested code has no business value - Alex Pukinskis

Answer 11

I'll call him Mel, because that was his name.

From The story of Mel

Answer 12

"Test what you fly, fly what you test."

Answer 13

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.

-- Dijkstra

Answer 14

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

Answer 15

This isn't strictly a programming quote and I don't recall where I first heard it, but I've repeated it plenty of times on the job:

If you don't test it, it doesn't work.

Answer 16

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
  — Mark Twain

Answer 17

You should go home if you are thinking suicidal thoughts.
  — Robert Read, "How to be a Programmer"

Answer 18

I had a teacher that would tell students who were getting ahead of themselves this:

You don't know what you don't know

I can't say for sure if it's his quote or something he picked up from somewhere else.

Answer 19

Just use string you G-- d---ed savages!

during debate about merits of char[] vs string

Answer 20

Concentrate Your Effort

Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.

Jack London

---

Somehow, I missed the (paraphrased, shorter) duplicate of this one:

Be Diligent

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it."

Part of one quote; I split them to narrow down the topic.

Answer 21

"That's not the way I would have done it"

Answer 22

By Mike Williams, one of the creators of Erlang:

1. Find the right methods—Design by Prototyping.
2. It is not good enough to have ideas, you must also be able to implement them and know they work.
3. Make mistakes on a small scale, not in a production project.

Answer 23

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.

-- Alan Kay

Answer 24

Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)

-- Linus Torvalds

Answer 25

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)
  — Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust"

Answer 26

double value; /* or your money back! */
short changed; /* so triple your money back! */

cons.c on perl source tree

Answer 27

I wish I could make Lust and Gluttony helpful but Sloth, Pride and Envy are certainly great for programmers." ~ Kenneth Clowes

Answer 28

There is no object-oriented problem that cannot be solved by adding a layer of indirection, except, of course, too many layers of indirection.

-- From "The Art of Unit Testing" Roy Osherove (attributed to an unnamed source)

Answer 29

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

^{Lord Kelvin}

Answer 30

Don't code today what you can't debug tomorrow

from this blog's title