Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Programmers - Page 2

With each passing year, because of advances in computer technology, there are more things, each more sophisticated, that we aren't allowed to do any more.

Sometimes, the only way to learn something really well is to revert to the state of mind of a novice and reawaken to the raw observations that you have accumulated instead of relying on the conclusions you have reached from the exogenous premises absorbed through teaching and bookish learning.

The only important property of evils of the past is that they not be repeated in the future, in any way, shape, or form.

That's why the smartest companies use Common Lisp, but lie about it so all their competitors think Lisp is slow and C++ is fast.

Before you know it, you're half-way done with your idea and you've accidentally learned how to do it too. In short, you start with little bit of something real and make it tick. Then you make it tock.

Obsolete comments are worse than no comments.

It's nuts that we've reached a situation where representing female characters - let alone minorities - is considered "social responsibility" and not, you know, depicting half the world's population. I often feel like the gaming audience is so much more diverse than the characters represented in the games that they play.

Short of coming to their senses and abolishing the whole thing, we might expect that the rules for daylight saving time will remain the same for some time to come, but there is no guarantee. (We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.

it's just that in C++ and the like, you don't trust anybody, and in CLOS you basically trust everybody. The practical result is that thieves and bums use C++ and nice people use CLOS.

So, think about how you use a disc that you own of an Xbox 360 game. If I buy the disc from a store, I use that disc in my machine, I can give that disc to my son and he can play it on his 360 in his room. We both can't play at the same time, but the disc is the key to playing. I can go round to your house and give you that disc and you can play on that game as well.

How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.

If car manufacturers made cars according to spec the same way software vendors make software according to spec, all five wheels would be of widely differing sizes, it would take one person to steer and another to work the pedals and yet another to operate the user-friendly menu-driven dashboard, and if it would not drive straight ahead without a lot of effort, civil engineers would respond by building spiraling roads around each city.

When a manager asks for hard data, that's usually just his way of saying no.

Some people are little more than herd animals, flocking together whenever the world becomes uncomfortable … I am not one of those people. If I had a motto, it would probably be Herd thither, me hither.

Suppose we blasted all politicians into space. Would the SETI project find even one of them?

Facebook has been around for seven years. It has 500 million users. If you can't figure out how to make money off half a billion people in seven years, I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're unlikely to ever do.

Whenever possible, steal code.

Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.

Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.

JavaScript is the only language that I'm aware of that people feel they don't need to learn before they start using it.

I have argued that a religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world - if it does, it is now or will eventually be wrong - but it can and should speak about the relevance and ranking of facts and observations.

Don't use hands to do things that can be efficiently done by the computer.

There's been an awful lot of discussion about what is or isn't simple, and people have gotten a pretty sophisticated notion of simplicity, but I'm not sure it has helped.

Things don't change because people change their minds. They change because they retire or die.

A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else.

We have no mom-and-pop oil rigs in Norway.

C is not clean – the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on.

A JSON decoder MAY accept and ignore comments.

What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a standstill under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading.

What was it like working with John Carmack on Quake? Like being strapped onto a rocket during takeoff – in the middle of a hurricane.

Most of the network related programming in games has to do with providing a good interactive experience when playing over the internet. This matter is very different from serving web pages. The primary concern there is to handle connection latency, latency fluctuations, packet loss and bandwidth limitations, and pretty much hide all of that from the player's experience.

People who use Class will never understand all the crap they are doing.

Dance allows confidence to grow and inhibitions to fall away, and I pride myself on building people's confidence.

Before Ruby on Rails, web programming required a lot of verbiage, steps and time. Now, web designers and software engineers can develop a website much faster and more simply, enabling them to be more productive and effective in their work.

I think there's a lot of scope in broadening the way videogames approach depictions of masculinity, which is still extremely narrow in scope. It would be nice to see a panel about gender in videogames and it not just be about one gender!

I was afraid that that Catch-22 would cause VR to fail to achieve liftoff. That worry is now gone. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus means that VR is going to happen in all its glory. The resources and long-term commitment that Facebook brings gives Oculus the runway it needs to solve the hard problems of VR – and some of them are hard indeed. I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.

If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem.

Good architecture is necessary to give programs enough structure to be able to grow large without collapsing into a puddle of confusion.

It turns out that strong typing does not eliminate the need for careful testing. And I have found in my work that the sorts of errors that strong type checking finds are no the errors I worry about.

The novice-friendly software is more like a misbehaving dog: it shits on the floor, it destroys things, and stinks - the novice-friendly software embodies the opposite of what computer people have dreamed of for decades: artificial stupidity. It's more human.

The reason for the success of this somewhat communist-sounding strategy, while the failure of communism itself is visible around the world, is that the economics of information are fundamentaly different from those of other products.

In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.

Programmers are as emotional and irrational as normal people

When you read the history of the human family, it slowly comes to you that all the world's oceans once fell as tears.

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

There's nothing that will bring realism into your world as quickly as realizing that you're out of cash.

The very word "exist" derives from "to step forth, to stand out".

If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong.

When sparks fly, some truly great ideas come to light.

I think [Wine] will be, at a minimum, incredibly useful to archeology, like DosBox has been for playing Wing Commander. Certainly it has been known to save the day with modern titles, too. But to have it as the agreed-upon way to how you play video games on Linux is completely unacceptable for several reasons, both technical and moral.

It took me some twenty-plus years to really learn how to program.

The Internet will not become a money machine until the banking industry figures out how to transfer money for free so you can charge USD 0.005 (half a cent) for some simple service like, say, reading a newspaper article you have searched for. With today's payment system, the cost of the transfer of the funds completely dwarf the cost of the service paid for. ... This situation, however, is what acutely prevents the Internet from taking off as a network for paid services.

I can find lots of examples where a game won't make you rich, but I can't find a reasonable case where a Linux port doesn't have at least a small, positive return on investment.

The structure of software systems tend to reflect the structure of the organization that produce them.

Gotos aren't damnable to begin with. If you aren't smart enough to distinguish what's bad about some gotos from all gotos, goto hell.

Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field.

Another piece of clarification around playing games at a friend's house - should you choose to play your game at your friend's house, there is no fee to play that game while you are signed in to your profile.

Historically, labor unions arose when people had gotten a taste of a different lifestyle and were willing to pay a lot more for their basic livelihood and had gotten into a fix they couldn't get out of - because they had accepted the unacceptable to begin with. Accepting something you have to form a labor union to fight after the fact only tells me that people were acting against their own best (or even good) interests for a long time. I don't see any rational, coherent explanation for this sort of behavior in humans, but it's all over the place.