Program Quotes - Page 8

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

Whatever future you're building, don't try to program everything.

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program.

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.

After you finish the first 90% of a project, you have to finish the other 90%.

Programmers can be lazy.

You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you've reached that point, you can only shift the burden around.

The system metaphor is a story that everyone--customers, programmers, and managers--can tell about how the system works.

Plato felt that a complete reconstruction of society's political program was needed.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

I have a big collection of quotation programs...In particular, I like MCR Software's Wisdom of the Ages, which has the best selection of relevant quotes I know.

The system is only as good as the person programming it. If you don't have the follow-through, your system is useless. And by the way, it's that way in parenting; it's that way in marriages.

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'.

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!

God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist.

Sequential programming is really hard, and parallel programming is a step beyond that.

Optimization hinders evolution.

If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.