replicator.org ... incoherent code

Computer Science and related

• Abstraction is selective ignorance. – Andrew Koenig
• C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off. – Bjarne Stroustrup
• The computing scientist’s main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. – E. W. Dijkstra
• I had a nightmare once in which I a had convinced a friend how wonderful C++ is. A while later he came back., and he was mad. – Robin Rosenberg
• In computer science, we stand on each other’s feet. – Brian Reid
• If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. – Linus Torvalds
• Over the 20 year time span, things have changed, other things have not changed, among them, my wardrobe. – Simon Peyton-Jones
• If everything you wanted a program to do already existed ready-made, it wouldn’t be called programming any more. It would be called shopping. – Raymond Chen
• The only intuitive user interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned.
• The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. – Fred Brooks
• Don’t just fix the mistakes — fix whatever permitted the mistake in the first place. – NASA
• Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OS’s is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
• Debugging is at least twice as hard as writing the program in the first place. So if your code is as clever as you can possibly make it, then by definition you’re not smart enough to debug it. – Brian Kernighan
• The user manual is a list of software design mistakes.
• Technology has the shelf life of a banana. – Scott McNealy
• I like to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code!
• Everyone needs computer programming. It will be the way we speak to the servants. – John McCarthy
• Linux is only free if your time has no value. – Jamie Zawinski
• Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more. – John McCarthy
• Do only what only you can do. – Edsger W. Dijkstra
• Software engineering has processes for everything except actually writing software. – Paul Johnson
• Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born. – Alan Kay
• Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
• To err is human, to really screw up you need a computer.
• When there’s a will to fail, obstacles can be found. – John McCarthy
• Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. – Edsger W. Dijkstra
• Computer games don’t affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
• The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. – Grace Hopper
• Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. – Alan Kay, Report on OOPSLA97
• 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. – Erik Naggum
• No pressure, no diamonds. – Thomas Carlyle
• In order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
• What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed. -Friedrich Nietzsche
• First, do no harm… —Hippocrates
• Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand. – Sherlock Holmes
• Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one. – Bill Gates
• Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers. – Leonard Brandwein
• E. coli carries about 100 gigabytes of state information. It moves its whole length in two nanoseconds. If it were the size of a car, it would be going four times the speed of light. It moves so fast that you can’t see anything inside it until it’s dead. It can replicate itself in under a minute. It is 500 times smaller than an animal cell. We have 10^13 of those in our bodies (that is 10000000000000!). Compared to a cell, a computer is slow and stupid. – From the book: Molecular Biology of the Gene
• What I cannot create, I do not understand – Richard Feynman
• A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Do you get it? – Steve Jobs on hiring people
• Work expands to fill the time available. – Cyril Northcote Parkinson
• Delay is the deadliest form of denial. – Cyril Northcote Parkinson
• It’s not the fittest, not the smartest, not the strongest; it’s the ones that can adapt to change. – Dean Kamen
• Program testing can convincingly show the presence of bugs but it is hopelessly inadequate to show their absence. – Edsger Dijkstra
• A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. – Gall’s law
• A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime. – Steve McConnel
• If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it on a large scale. – Principles of Software Engineering Management (book).
• I spend my time making things, writing, building… not repairing my computer or updating endless components to make Bill richer or Linus cooler. – Carl Sassenrath
• If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization – Anonymous
• More sins are committed by premature optimization than all the rest of programming motives put together. – Jerry Archibald
• Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. There’s no such thing as information overload. – Edward Tufte
• Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta. – Charles Simonyi
• When C++ is your hammer, every problem looks like your thumb. – Preston Briggs
• Jesus saves. Buddha does incremental backups. – Unknown
• When people react instantly, they’re not thinking, they’re doing a table lookup. – Alan Kay
• Coffee is a device for extracting code from programmers – Anonymous
• The only history of software is that we have been saved by hardware. – Dave Thomas
• I’d suggest you think long and hard before deciding to port a 1 000 000 line of code application to FUCKING JAVASCRIPT – joe90210 on programming.reddit.com
• If you need lots of tools, you know that you got a bad platform. – Dave Thomas
• If you’re doing a big project in C or C++, well, you’re going to end up reinventing most of the lisp runtime anyway. – Jamie Zawinski
• Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it. – Alan Kay
• Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. – Keith Bostic
• Vi is a subset of evil.
• Cubicles are causing brain damage. – Andy Hunt
• I have come to believe that allowing multiple mailboxes in IMAP, as opposed to promoting keywords, was a mistake. Note that this is, effectively, what Gmail does. – Mark Crispin, imap-protocol mailing list 20090217
• There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users: the computer industry and the drug trade – Edward Tufte
• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. – Donald Knuth
• They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction. – Janet Reno
• Never trust a programmer in a suit.
• I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. – Tony Hoare
• The way to make a program faster is to never let it get slower. – WebKit Performance statement
• If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution. – Robert Sewell
• God could create the world in six days because he didn’t have to make it compatible with the previous version.
• Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. – Edward V Berard
• Developers aren’t awkward; developing makes them awkward. – Christian Perry
• Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven – Charles Petzold
• I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone – Bjarne Stroustrup
• The stack is an implementation detail. – Eric Lippert
• The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working. – John Ousterhout
• You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time. – Bertrand Meyer
• Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. – Comment in XeePhotoshopLoader.m
• If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough. – Alan Kay
• Programming sage Donald Knuth taught us that “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” It turns out that this doesn’t just apply to coding. – Chip Morningstar
• If you want to improve your software, don’t test more; develop better. – Steve McConnel
• The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad! – Richard Feynman
• ... it is often better to wait til you have several examples of the duplication so you can better see how to eliminate it. – Ralph Johnson
• Software has to be its own documentation. – Giles Colborne
• Programmers shouldn’t be soldering. This is almost as bad as that one time I had to write Perl code. Almost. – twitter.com/codinghorror
• Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems – Jamie Zawinski
• Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow. – Fred Brooks
• If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two. – Craig Zerouni
• I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. – Douglas Adams
• I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. – Dwight Eisenhower
• You’re bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything. – Donald Knuth
• Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. – Louis Srygley
• Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability – Edsger W. Dijkstra
• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. – Leonardo da Vinci
• Elegance is not optional – Richard O’Keefe
• An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only. – Bjarne Stroustrup
• Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. – Laurence J. Peter
• Copy and paste is a design error – David Parnas
• When 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution. – Toyota’s president, Katuaki Watanabe
• It is nearly impossible to solve a problem for someone if they don’t believe they have the problem, even if they really, really do. – Chip Morningstar
• recursion: see recursion – The Programmers Dictionary
• It is inevitable that even an ERLANG programmer will not write perfect programs. – Concurrent Programming in Erlang, page 91
• An engineer is someone who can make for a dollar what any fool could make for two. – Alan Kay
• If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. – Robert Cringely
• Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. – Stan Kelly-Bootle
• Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind. – Donald Knuth
• If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong. – Norm Schryer
• If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge. – Henry Spencer

• The length of a progress report is inversely proportional to the amount of progress. – Unknown

Others about philosophy, politics, religion and life in general.

• Everything you own ends up owning you. – Fight Club
• Each of us is 750 times more likely to be killed by an asteroid than to win this weekend’s lottery.
• The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. – Gloria Steinem
• A human can very well do what he wants, but can not will what he wants. – Arthur Schopenhauer
• Some of us just go one god further… – Richard Dawkins
• Reality is just a point of view. – P. K. Dick
• The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed – William Gibson
• What’s important is not what is gone, but what remains. – Homeproject
• For men, self-improvement ends at toilet training.
• Godwin’s Law of Parenting: sure, your baby is cute, but so was baby Adolf Hitler.
• Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness. – Edward Stanley
• Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
• God was invented to explain mystery. – Richard Feynman
• The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one. – Douglas Crockford
• Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm. – Erik Naggum
• On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. – Fight Club
• Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one. – Henry Mencken
• Procrastinate later. – Anonymous
• Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity. – Anonymous
• Anything worth doing is worth doing well. – Anonymous
• People too weak to follow their own dreams will always find a way to discourage others. – Anonymous
• Productivity is measured with tangible results, not with time and energy spent. – Max Pool
• It’s not the fall that kills you — it’s the sudden stop at the end.
• Just because you are unique does not mean you are useful.
• In most instances, all an argument proves is that two people are present. – Anonymous
• The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt. – Bertrand Russell
• One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. – Bertrand Russell
• To understand is to transform what is. – J. Krishnamurti
• Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting. – Karl Wallenda
• In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
• If men believe a situation to be real, it is real in its consequences. – William Thomas
• The nature of existence is impermanence. – Buddha
• Leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow. – Dilbert
• Wisdom consists of knowing when to avoid perfection. – Horowitz
• The paperless office will happen soon after the paperless toilet. – Unknown
• The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you’re still a rat. – Lily Tomlin
• You must be the change you want to see in the world – Mahatma Ghandi
• If you’re not pissing somebody off, you’re not doing your job. – Bill Camp
• The trouble with the gene pool is that there’s no lifeguard. – Baldwin
• All of science can be divided into physics and stamp-collecting. – Lord Kelvin
• Being President is like running a cemetery. You’ve got a lot of people under you, but nobody’s listening. – Bill Clinton
• Sometimes, fear is the appropriate response. – 9, the movie
• Unless you are a politician, “true” and “false” are boolean conditions. – Practices of an Agile Developer, page 96
• The biggest impediment to making decisions is too much knowledge. – Bill Camp
• Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river. – Cordell Hull
• Some problems don’t go away until people retire. – Dan Hitchcock, DOE
• We are all hardwired to lie to everyone including ourselves. – Linda Rising
• Being right early is the same as being wrong. – Unknown
• The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success – Bruce Feirstein
• If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. – Cicero
• Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats. – Howard Aiken
• Always tell the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said. – Mark Twain
• Success in life consists of going from one mistake to the next without losing enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
• Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
• It is better to be silent and thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. – Silvan Engel
• Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure. – L. Neil Smith
• To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe. – Louis Ferdinand Celine
• Everything is cool as long as I’m getting thinner. – Lily Allen, The Fear
• Life’s about film stars and less about mothers. – Lily Allen, The Fear
• I am a weapon of massive consumption. – Lily Allen, The Fear
• If you want people to understand, explain it with money.
• There are 2 kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there. – Indira Gandhi
• Always have a vision. Why spend your life making other people’s dreams? – Orson Welles
• Neologism: 1: a new word, usage, or expression. 2: a meaningless word coined by a psychotic. – Merriam-Webster
• The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of people, who have not viewed the world. – Alexander von Humboldt
• I have a great love for humanity, it’s the people that bother me. – Linus Charles Schulz
• Don’t think outside the box if the box was built just for people like you. – Anonymous
• Smart people tend to systematically overestimate the value of being smart. – Chip Morningstar
• Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt
• Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. – Conway’s law
• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. – Albert Einstein
• Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. – Hanlon’s razor
• It’s not reality’s job to satisfy our egos. – Anonymous
• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. – Richard Feynman
• They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. – Andy Warhol
• Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – Will Rogers
• Life is as real as it seems. – Wolfsheim
• If something is easy, we call it a game and serve beer. – Aaron Oliver
• The world is full of jerks; The internet makes it seem like they’re all next door to you.
• It’s too late to be a pessimist – Homeproject
• LeBlanc’s law: Later equals never.
• The first generation earns the money, the second administrates the money, the third studies history of art and the fourth sinks into poverty totally. – Otto von Bismarck
• The devil doesn’t need an advocate. The brave need supporters, not critics. – Seth Godin
• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. – George Santayana
• Manage your energy, not your time – Tony Schwartz
• The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. – Flannery O’Connor
• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana
• I’m going to live forever. Or die trying. – Anonymous

• Nothing is more certain than the certainty of being uncertain. – Anonymous