The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.
Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time.
Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.
I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.
Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.
Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn’t as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.
If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.
Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
One of the big lessons of a big project is you don’t want people that aren’t really programmers programming, you’ll suffer for it!
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.
All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.
God help us, we’re in the hands of engineers.