Sometimes a short thought can bring amazing ideas. There are some great quotes I’ve been collecting. I use them as inspiration or motto for some articles. Software Design There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Phil Karlton What Exactly Is A Name: Rehab [Part II] Make illegal states unrepresentable. Yaron Minsky Is it Crystal Clear for Everybody That a Date Should Not Mutate? First make the change easy (warning: this might be hard), then make the easy change. Kent Beck Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. Alan Kay Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable. Ralph Johnson Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. Edsger W. Dijkstra Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. Alan Kay Premature optimization is the root of all evil Donald Knuth Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection. David Wheeler The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state. J. Osterhout I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level Donald Knuth Object-oriented programming languages support encapsulation, thereby improving the ability of software to be reused, refined, tested, maintained, and extended. The full benefit of this support can only be realized if encapsulation is maximized during the design process. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes. There is an essential unity of mathematics and computer science Michael R. Fellows A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila. Mitch Ratcliffe Fail Fast Philosophy, Explained Photo by on Shahadat Rahman Unsplash Programming Languages Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. Niklaus Wirth More good code has been written in languages denounced as “bad” than in languages proclaimed “wonderful” — much more. Bjarne Stroustrup Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out. Alan Kay There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. Bjarne Stroustrup Photo by on You X Ventures Unsplash Planning / Management 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 Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Fred Brooks There Are No Silver Bullets For This Werewolf You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software; you cannot mass-produce the human mind. Michio Kaku Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. Melvin Conway Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment. Kent Beck Photo by on Bench Accounting Unsplash Clean Code Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. John Woods Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. Martin Fowler Deleted code is debugged code. Jeff Sickel Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. Jamie Zawinski Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Brian Kernighan Don’t comment bad code — rewrite it. Brian Kernighan What Exactly Is A Name: The Quest [Part I] Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad. Cory House One day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, “What is that, swearing?” Larry Wall A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment. - Robert Martin Talk is cheap. Show me the code. Linus Torvalds Photo by on Raquel Martínez Unsplash Software Quality Legacy code is code without tests. Michael Feathers An exercise improving legacy codemedium.com Software testing is not only ensuring absence of bugs but also ensuring presence of value. Amit Kalantri Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it. DeMarco and Lister Nothing makes a system more flexible than a suite of tests - Robert Martin There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. Alan J. Perlis As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. David Parnas Photo by on Kelvyn Ornettte Sol Marte Unsplash Refactoring Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent. Martin Fowler Photo by on National Cancer Institute Unsplash Object Oriented Let there be no doubt that object-oriented design is fundamentally different than traditional structured design approaches: it requires different ways of thinking about decomposition, and it produces software architectures that are largely outside the realm of the structured design culture. Grady Booch I invented the term ‘object oriented’, and C++ was not what I had in mind Alan Kay Part of the objective of this series of articles is to generate spaces for debate and discussion on software design. We look forward to comments and suggestions on this article. Lead Photo by on Zac Durant Unsplash

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40+ Thought-Provoking Software Engineering Quotes

40+ Thought-Provoking Software Engineering Quotes

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