Bits
Bits and pieces of software development and Unix wisdom, mixed with some humor.
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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
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Programming languages, like pizza, come in only two sizes: too big and too small.
-- Richard Pattis
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Software obeys the law of gaseous expansion - it continues to grow until memory is completely filled.
-- Larry Gleason
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Threads and signals are a platform-dependant trail of misery, despair, horror and madness.
-- Anthony Baxter
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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
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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
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When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.
-- Rob Pike
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Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn’t clarify the meaning, it destroys it.
-- Clay Shirky
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An evolving system increases its complexity unless work is done to reduce it.
-- Meir Lehman
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Nobody wants to program with mutable strings anymore, why do you want to program with mutable collections?
-- Rich Hickey
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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
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> What does tomorrow's unix look like?
I'm confident that tomorrow's Unix will look like today's Unix, only cruftier.
-- Russ Cox
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
-- Linus Torvalds
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Be careful to preserve the orthogonality of your system as you introduce third-party toolkits and libraries. Choose your technologies wisely.
-- Andy Hunt
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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
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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
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So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.
-- Ryan Singer
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The lurking suspicion that something could be simplified is the world's richest source of rewarding challenges.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
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Premature optimizations can be troublesome to revert, but premature generalizations are often near impossible.
-- Emil Persson
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Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people’s mistakes.
-- David Wheeler
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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
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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
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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
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The standard rule is, when you're in a hole, stop digging; that seems not to apply [to] software nowadays.
-- Ron Minnich
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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
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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
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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
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I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
-- Douglas Adams
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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
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If you are choosing a JavaScript library purely based on popularity, I think you deserve what you get.
-- Tom Dale
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If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how fast it doesn't work.
-- Ravera's observation on premature optimization
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If you want to confuse your enemies, give them the source code. If you want to really confuse them, give them the documentation.
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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