Bits

Bits and pieces of software development and Unix wisdom, mixed with some humor.

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πŸ•‘ Jun 19, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

People do have a right to put their code under whatever license they like. Now, I won’t use the stuff I don’t have a source for unless I have exceptionally good reason to believe that authors of that stuff are among the few percents of programmers who can find their arse without outside help. But that has nothing to do with licensing or any moral considerations and everything to the fact that I know what kind of crap most of the software is.

-- Al Viro

πŸ•‘ Jun 14, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Programming languages, like pizza, come in only two sizes: too big and too small.

-- Richard Pattis

πŸ•‘ May 10, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.

-- Larry Gleason

πŸ•‘ Apr 26, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Threads and signals are a platform-dependant trail of misery, despair, horror and madness.

-- Anthony Baxter

πŸ•‘ Apr 22, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.

-- P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983

πŸ•‘ Apr 19, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

-- Alan Kay

πŸ•‘ Apr 17, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

-- Rob Pike

πŸ•‘ Apr 15, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.

-- Clay Shirky

πŸ•‘ Apr 14, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Life is too short to run proprietary software.

-- Bdale Garbee

πŸ•‘ Apr 11, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

An evolving system increases its complexity unless work is done to reduce it.

-- Meir Lehman

πŸ•‘ Apr 10, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Nobody wants to program with mutable strings anymore, why do you want to program with mutable collections?

-- Rich Hickey

πŸ•‘ Apr 9, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

-- Frederick P. Brooks

πŸ•‘ Apr 8, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it. It’s worked for many people, and it can work for you.

-- Ron Minnich

πŸ•‘ Apr 5, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

> What does tomorrow's unix look like?

I'm confident that tomorrow's Unix will look like today's Unix, only cruftier.

-- Russ Cox

πŸ•‘ Apr 4, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Our programming house is like a hoarder's delight: there's too much stuff in it everything is too big. We need too many people to do basic things.

-- Rich Hickey

πŸ•‘ Apr 3, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich may find hard to pay.

-- Tony Hoare

πŸ•‘ Apr 2, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The secret to building large apps is never build large apps. Break your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application.

-- Justin Meyer

πŸ•‘ Apr 1, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Increasingly, people seem to interpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling - the incomprehensible should cause suspicion, not admiration. Possibly this results from the mistaken belief that using a mysterious device confers [extra] power on the user.

-- Niklaus Wirth

πŸ•‘ Mar 31, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

-- Linus Torvalds

πŸ•‘ Mar 30, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.

-- Roy Carlson

πŸ•‘ Mar 29, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Be careful to preserve the orthogonality of your system as you introduce third-party toolkits and libraries. Choose your technologies wisely.

-- Andy Hunt

πŸ•‘ Mar 28, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer.

-- Paul Leary

πŸ•‘ Mar 26, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Big difference.

-- Scott Ambler

πŸ•‘ Mar 23, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.

-- Ryan Singer

πŸ•‘ Mar 21, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

πŸ•‘ Mar 18, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Premature optimizations can be troublesome to revert, but premature generalizations are often near impossible.

-- Emil Persson

πŸ•‘ Mar 17, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Tests are the Programmer's stone, transmuting fear into boredom.

-- Kent Beck

πŸ•‘ Mar 16, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people’s mistakes.

-- David Wheeler

πŸ•‘ Mar 15, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. […] The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other.

-- John Carmack

πŸ•‘ Mar 14, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.

-- Robert C. Martin

πŸ•‘ Mar 13, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

It can be better to copy a little code than to pull in a big library for one function. Dependency hygiene trumps code reuse.

-- Rob Pike

πŸ•‘ Mar 12, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.

-- Burt Rutan

πŸ•‘ Mar 11, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The standard rule is, when you're in a hole, stop digging; that seems not to apply [to] software nowadays.

-- Ron Minnich

πŸ•‘ Mar 10, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

-- Nathaniel Borenstein

πŸ•‘ Mar 9, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

The code you write makes you a programmer. The code you delete makes you a good one. The code you don't have to write makes you a great one.

-- Mario Fusco

πŸ•‘ Mar 8, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes - build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again.

-- Nato Software Engineering Conference '68

πŸ•‘ Mar 7, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

-- Douglas Adams

πŸ•‘ Mar 6, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?"

-- Steve McConnell

πŸ•‘ Mar 5, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

If you are choosing a JavaScript library purely based on popularity, I think you deserve what you get.

-- Tom Dale

πŸ•‘ Mar 4, 2024 Mastodon πŸ”—

One man's crappy software is another man's full time job.

-- Jessica Gaston

πŸ•‘ Nov 20, 2023 Mastodon πŸ”—

Development has two outputs... code & bugs

πŸ•‘ Nov 19, 2023 Mastodon πŸ”—

If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how fast it doesn't work.

-- Ravera's observation on premature optimization

πŸ•‘ Nov 18, 2023 Mastodon πŸ”—

If you want to confuse your enemies, give them the source code. If you want to really confuse them, give them the documentation.

πŸ•‘ Nov 17, 2023 Mastodon πŸ”—

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

-- E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful