Quotes

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set? - This is from Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming, p. xiv.

''I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.'' - Turing award speech by Hoare

''A modern web browser is the software equivalent of Gabriel’s Horn. Finite volume, but infinite attack surface.'' - Ted Unangst, features are faults

''I’m a software developer. I create bugs.'' - Danny Tuppeny, Have Software Developers Given Up?

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code. - Ken Thompson

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one - Russian Proverb

''Nobody wants to say how this works. Maybe nobody knows ...'' -- - xorg.conf(5) manual page (copied from her

Lord knows how GCC does register allocation right now -- found here, has since been updated.

''Bugs in version N are fixed in version N+1, but new bugs are introduced. And noone cares about trying to settle things down and produce a compiler one can trust (because version N+1 runs 3.14% faster in the loonystones benchmark which doesn't match any real life use case).'' -- Miod Vallat, Compilers in OpenBSD

''This idea of living with bugs is plaguing the software industry. Nothing seems to work, but we keep demanding and piling on more features.'' ''We are well beyond tech debt and dangerously close to insolvency. We keep pumping out the features while only paying the interest.'' - Kelsey Hightower

All things being equal, less code is always better. - A Conversation with Arthur Whitney

Programmer productivity is approaching zero - Anonymous