A Quote by Douglas McIlroy

The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.

Douglas McIlroy

Quote Topics

Code Hero Negative Programming Real Writes

Quote Author

Douglas McIlroy
Mathematician
Born: 1932

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

No hero is a hero if he ever killed someone! Only the man who has not any blood in his hand can be a real hero! The honour of being a hero belongs exclusively to the peaceful people!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

My impression was and is that many programming languages and tools represent solutions looking for problems, and I was determined that my work should not fall into that category. Thus, I follow the literature on programming languages and the debates about programming languages primarily looking for ideas for solutions to problems my colleagues and I have encountered in real applications. Other programming languages constitute a mountain of ideas and inspiration-but it has to be mined carefully to avoid featurism and inconsistencies.

Bjarne Stroustrup

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

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

Charles Petzold

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

Ellen Ullman

Here's the point - and Jonah Goldberg reminds us of this. He wrote a blog post that was titled "The MacGuffinization of American Politics." Do you know what a MacGuffin is? "'In a movie or book, 'The MacGuffin' is the thing the hero wants,' Ace writes." So in the Maltese Falcon, for example, the hero wants the Maltese Falcon, but there's always somebody trying to stop the hero from getting what he wants.

Rush Limbaugh

I also love Mole, the unsung hero of reality programming.

Kathy Griffin

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

Perhaps we could write code to optimize code, then run that code through the code optimizer?

Stephen Hawking

It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it -- both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code -- just feminine code.

Elizabeth Wein

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming.

Niklaus Wirth

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.

Tony Hoare

There's a definite sense this morning on the part of the Kerry voters that perhaps this is code, 'moral values,' is code for something else. It's code for taking a different position about gays in America, an exclusionary position, a code about abortion, code about imposing Christianity over other faiths.

Diane Sawyer

A Quote by Douglas McIlroy

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors