A Quote by Bram Cohen

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless — © Bram Cohen
The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless
The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.
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".
Before 'Dilbert,' I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.
You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that.
The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.
If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.
I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.
There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.
At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.
I spent most of my 20s dating older men, and I really wish I had spent that time dating men my own age who were going through the same experiences I was. I totally understand the appeal of a mature, dashing older man over fellow twenty-somethings who are still figuring things out. And, true, a fling with an older man can be instructive in many ways, and no doubt he finds you attractive.
The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.
Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.
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.
The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
The superficiality of many is a result of deep fears. It takes spare time to think things out; it takes free time to mature. People in a hurry may not think well or mature well. The next best is a state of perpetual puerility.
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