Computer Programming

[Michael Bush]

(apologies for some repeats)

    The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit. (Anonymous)

    Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. (Louis Srygley)

    Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable. (Ralph Johnson)

    The best method for accelerating a computer is the one that boosts it by 9.8 m/s2. (Anonymous)

    I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn?t show up in a Unix directory listing. (Oktal)

    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. (Gerald Weinberg)

    There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. (Alan J. Perlis)

    Ready, fire, aim: the fast approach to software development. Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim: the slow approach to software development. (Anonymous)

    It?s not a bug ? it?s an undocumented feature. (Anonymous)

    One man?s crappy software is another man?s full-time job. (Jessica Gaston)

    A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. (Doug Linder)

    Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. (Martin Golding

    Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. (Michael Sinz)

    Deleted code is debugged code. (Jeff Sickel)

    Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. (Edward V Berard)

    If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. (Edsger Dijkstra)

    Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it?s released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn?t work. (Anonymous)

    Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning. (Rick Cook)

    It?s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, but we also don?t learn from our successes. (Keith Braithwaite)

    There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bleep about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

    In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. (Anonymous)

    The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren?t there. (Gordon Bell)

    The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state. (J. Osterhout)

    The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it?s too late. (Seymour Cray)

    Don?t worry if it doesn?t work right. If everything did, you?d be out of a job. (Mosher?s Law of Software Engineering)

  The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. (Seymour Cray)

  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. (Douglas Adams)

  A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. (Doug Linder)

  If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. (Edsger Dijkstra)

  As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. (Maurice Wilkes)

  Nine people can't make a baby in a month. (Fred Brooks)

  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. (Tony Hoare)

  There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. (Alan Perlis)

  A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do (Dennis Ritchie)

  Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris. (Larry Wall)

  Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. (Bill Gates)

  Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. (Brian Kernighan)

  Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Niklaus Wirth)

  The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state. (John Ousterhout)

  Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law (Douglas Hofstadter)

  In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. (Yogi Berra)

  It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. (Edsger Dijkstra)

  Software sucks because users demand it to. (Nathan Myhrvold)

  One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code. (Ken Thompson)

  The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. (Edsger Dijkstra)

  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)

  Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. (Rick Cook)

  Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. (Fred Brooks)

  Any fool can use a computer. Many do. (Ted Nelson)

"Programmer: A machine that turns coffee into code." (source)
"Computers are fast; programmers keep it slow." (source)
"When I wrote this code, only God and I understood what I did. Now only God knows." (source)
"A son asked his father (a programmer) why the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west. His response? It works, don?t touch!" (source)
"How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None, that?s a hardware problem." (source)
"Programming is like sex: One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life." (source)
"Programming can be fun, and so can cryptography; however, they should not be combined." (source)
"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." (source)
"Copy-and-Paste was programmed by programmers for programmers actually." (source)
"Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." (source)
"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." (source)
"Algorithm: Word used by programmers when they don?t want to explain what they did." (source)
"Software and cathedrals are much the same ? first we build them, then we pray." (source)
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works." (source)
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." (source)
"99 little bugs in the code. 99 little bugs in the code. Take one down, patch it around. 127 little bugs in the code ?" (source)
"Remember that there is no code faster than no code." (source)
"One man?s crappy software is another man?s full-time job." (source)
"No code has zero defects." (source)
"A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." (source)
"Deleted code is debugged code." (source)
"Don?t worry if it doesn?t work right. If everything did, you?d be out of a job." (source)
"It?s not a bug ? it?s an undocumented feature." (source)
Voodoo Programming (source)
"It works on my machine." (source)
"It compiles; ship it." (source)
Software Engineering
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." (source)
"In a room full of top software designers, if two agree on the same thing, that?s a majority." (source)
"One: Demonstrations always crash. And two: The probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching." (source)
"A program is never less than 90% complete and never more than 95% complete." (source)
"In a software project team of ten, there are probably three people who produce enough defects to make them net-negative producers." (source)
"Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris." (source)
"I?ve finally learned what upward compatible means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." (source)
"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." (source)
"Documentation is like sex: When it is bad, it is better than nothing. When it is good, it is really, really good." (source)
"Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it?s released. Beta is Latin for still doesn?t work." (source)
Languages and Logic
"There are only two kinds of programming languages out there. The ones people complain about and the ones no one uses." (source)
"Programming made the impossible possible. You can have a null object and a constant variable." (source)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off." (source)
"The evolution of languages: FORTRAN is a nontyped language. C is a weakly typed language. Ada is a strongly typed language. C++ is a strongly hyped language." (source)
"C++: An octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog." (source)
"When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb." (source)
"C programmers never die. They are just cast into void." (source)
"Without C we only have Obol, Pasal, and BASI." (source)
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." (source)
"In C we had to code our own bugs. In C++ we can inherit them." (source)
"Q: How different are C and C++? A: 1. Because C ? C++ = 1." (source)
"What?s the object-oriented way to get wealthy? Inheritance." (source)
"C++: Where your friends have access to your private members." (source)
"Why do Java programmers have to wear glasses? Because they don?t C#." (source)
"Q: What did the Java code say to the C code? A: You?ve got no class." (source)
"If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs." (source)
"You?ll surely have fun when programming Kotlin, promised." (source)
"There?s no obfuscated Perl contest because it?s pointless." (source)
"Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption." (source)
"Some people when confronted with a problem think, "I know, I?ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems." (source)
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." (source)
"JavaScript logic: 0 == "0" and 0 == []; therefore, "0" != []. (source)
"Python: Executable pseudocode. Perl: Executable line noise." (source)
"Should one learn Advanced BASIC programming language?" (source)
"Knock, knock ? Who?s there? ? *very long pause* ? Java."(source)
"God is real ? unless declared integer." (source)
"COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods." (source)
"A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables, and asks, ?Can I join you??" (source)
"To understand what recursion is, you must first understand recursion." (source)
"Russian roulette: [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click*" (source)
"The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit." (source)
"Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, ?Are you ill?? The second byte replies, ?No, just feeling a bit off.?" (source)
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who know binary and those who don?t." (source)
"William Shakespeare?s question 2B OR NOT 2B = FF. (source)
"Q: If 1 is true and 0 is false? A: 1." (source)
"Programmer?s partner: ?Are you going to sit and type in front of that thing all day, or are you going out with me?? Programmer: ?Yes.?" (source)
"There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things." (source)
Platform, Tools, and Administration
"UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity." (source)
"UNIX is user friendly. It?s just very particular about who its friends are." (source)
"UNIX was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things." (source)
"Why programmers like UNIX: unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes, fsck, fsck, fsck, umount, sleep." (source)
"Linux is only free if your time has no value." (source)
"A system administrator has two problems: 1. Dumb users. 2. Smart users." (source)
"Potential partners are like internet domain names ? the ones I like are already taken." (source)
"Keyboard Failure. Press F1 to continue." (source)
"If the box says, ?This software requires Windows XP or better,? does that mean it?ll run on Linux?" (source)
"vi vi vi ? the editor of the beast." (source)
".NET is called .NET so that it wouldn?t show up in a UNIX directory listing." (source)
"ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI." (source)
"Hardware is made to last. Software is made to change. Change is the only thing that lasts. Software wins." (source)
"There?s no place like 127.0.0.1." (source)
General
"I have not failed. I?ve just found 10,000 ways that won?t work." (source)
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone." (source)
"When we had no computers, we had no programming problems either." (source)
"There is an easy way and a hard way. The hard part is finding the easy way." (source)
"Computers are good at following instructions but not at reading your mind." (source)
"The best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections." (source)
"The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before." (source)
"Q: Is the glass half-full or half-empty? A: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be." (source)
"In theory, there ought to be no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." (source)
"There is no Ctrl-Z in life." (source)
"Whitespace is never white." (source)
"When all else fails ? reboot." (source)

I get annoyed when people say that us programmers have a superiority complex.
It's not a complex, you idiots

A journalist asked a programmer:- What makes code bad?
No comment.

A programmer puts two glasses on his bedside table before going to sleep.
One full of water in case he gets thirsty and an empty one in case he doesn't.

I wanted to be a better computer programmer so I decided to slowly improve my binary skills
You could say I improved bit by bit

What do programmers want from their bosses?
Arrays

What language is most commonly used by programmers?
Vulgar

    A chemist, a mechanic, a electrician, and a programmer were driving in a car when it broke down.
"This must be because we've mixed the wrong fuel additive!" said the chemist.
    "Bollocks!" said the mechanic. "This is clearly a mechanical problem. There must be something wrong with the engine."
    "Both of you are wrong. The problem lies with the car wiring and the battery." argued the electrician.
    The programmer sighed and said, "Guys, calm down. I think we should just close all the windows, turn off the car and turn it on again."

    A physicist, a mathematician and a computer programmer discuss what is better: a wife or a girlfriend.
    The physicist: "A girlfriend. You still have freedom to experiment."
    The mathematician: "A wife. You have security."
    The computer programmer: "Both. When I'm not with my wife, she thinks I'm with my girlfriend. With my girlfriend it's vice versa. And that way I can be on my computer without anyone disturbing me..."

99 programming bugs in the code.
99 programming bugs.
Take one down, patch it all up.
111 programming bugs in the code.

111 programming bugs in the code.
111 programming bugs.
Take one down, patch it all up....