A Quote by Charles Petzold

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

Charles Petzold

Quote Topics

Code Eating Like Machine Programming

Quote Author

Charles Petzold
American - Businessman
Born: February 2, 1953

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.

Richard Dawkins

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

Jonathan Zittrain

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

Dave Thomas

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.

Joel Spolsky

I don't think it's illegal. I don't think it's against the rules. It's as dangerous for me to have a toothpick in your mouth as it is to have a 200-pound man punch me in the face hard or try to kick me in the face. I'm more worried about that, to be honest. I don't have any superstitions. I won world titles with a toothpick. I defended it without a toothpick. It all depends. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't. It's a bad habit. I know I shouldn't do it, but it's fine.

Benson Henderson

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

Jasmine smirke at the weapon in my hand. "That little toothpick won't save you, Gypsy." "Touthpick?" Vic muttered in an indignant voice. “Did she just call me a bleeding toothpick? Kill her! Kill her now!

Jennifer Estep

Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.

Ellen Ullman

My approach is to start from the straightforward principle that our body is a machine. A very complicated machine, but none the less a machine, and it can be subjected to maintenance and repair in the same way as a simple machine, like a car.

Aubrey de Grey

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you - and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.

Jonathan Zittrain

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

Bill Gates

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

I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"