short quotes by the masters

Jane Prusakova's picture
Submitted by Jane Prusakova on Sat, Oct 25 2008 - 11:17 AM

David Wheeler, a world's first PhD in Computer Science, said : "Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection."

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creater of C++, confessed: "I once gave a programming language talk without any code. I felt like such a fraud, I have not done it since."

Kernighan's Law: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won't be clever enough to debug it."

Comments

softwarejanitor's picture

I particularly like the

Submitted by softwarejanitor on Sat, Oct 25 2008 - 7:09 PM.

I particularly like the Kernighan quote... But then I've been a fan of his for a long time, Dennis Ritchie too, for that matter. I spent a lot of my early years in the business learning from their writing and from their code. I still have my very well worn copy of the original K&R "Programming C" book. That quote touches on one of the most important things you can learn from those guys, their "keep it simple" approach to many things. To many people work too hard to make things more complicated than they need to be.

mattreedy's picture

These are all great, thanks.

Submitted by mattreedy on Mon, Oct 27 2008 - 7:15 AM.

These are all great, thanks. Don't forget Brooks's law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".