Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. (Larry Wall) If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. (Edsger Dijkstra) It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute. (Marvin Minsky) The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit. (Anonymous)
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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. (Gerald Weinberg) The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability. (Randall E. Stross) The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit. (Nytwind) It’s not a bug – it’s an undocumented feature. (Anonymous) We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0. (Andy Pierson)
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. (Edsger W. Dijkstra) Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. (Edward V Berard) As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. (Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949) Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders. (Alanna)
Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it’s released. Beta is Latin for “still doesn’t work”. (Anonymous) I’ve finally learned what ‘upward compatible’ means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes. (Dennie van Tassel) Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. (Louis Srygley) Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the ‘most reliable Windows ever.’ To me, this is like saying that asparagus is ‘the most articulate vegetable ever.’ (Dave Barry)
