You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software; you cannot mass-produce the human mind.
-Michio Kaku
I invented the term ‘object oriented’, and C++ was not what I had in mind
-Alan Kay
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
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
Nothing makes a system more flexible than a suite of tests
The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.
-J. Osterhout
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
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
-Jamie Zawinski
The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.
-Alan Cooper
One day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, "What is that, swearing?"
-Larry Wall
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
-Mitch Ratcliffe
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
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
Deleted code is debugged code
-Jeff Sickel
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
-David Parnas
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
-Alan Kay
OOP 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.
The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
-Tom Cargill
The biggest issue on software teams is making sure everyone understands what everyone else is doing.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
-Donald Knuth
Types are essentially assertions about a program. And I think it’s valuable to have things be as absolutely simple as possible, including not even saying what the types are.
Somebody will say they have a program that’s verified and it’s only verified because it met its specification according to some verifier. But the verifier might have bugs in it. The specifications might have bugs in them
-Donald Knuth
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
-Donald Knuth
If someone claims to have the perfect programming language, he is either a fool or a salesman or both.
-Bjarne Stroustrup
There is an art to knowing where things should be checked and making sure that the program fails fast if you make a mistake. That kind of choosing is part of the art of simplification.
-Ward Cunningham
The most effective tool available for dealing with complexity is abstraction. Many types of abstraction can be used, but encapsulation is the main form of abstraction by which complexity is managed in OOP
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
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
Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.
-Bertrand Meyer
I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
-Tony Hoare
Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for modification.
- Bertrand Meyer
Programming is not about typing, it's about thinking.
- Rich Hickey
If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it’s doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the what.
Architecture is the tension between coupling and cohesion.
-Neal Ford
Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.
-Kreitzberg & Shneiderman.
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
-Richard Hamming
The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.
-Boris Beizer
You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.
-Tony Hoare
We comfort ourselves with the belief that if the customers had just been happy with what they said they needed, the design would have been fine. It’s the customer’s fault for changing the requirements on us.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
-Peter Drucker
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack
-Kyle Simpson
The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.
-Alan Cooper
Thinking about my experience of modifying
code, I see that I spend much more time reading the existing code than I do writing new code. If I want to make my code cheap, therefore, I should make it easy to read.
-Kent Beck
“It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!”
The Scrum idea of a separated Scrum Master is good for Scrum, but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers.
-Bertrand Meyer
The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.
Thinking is not the ability to manipulate language; it's the ability to manipulate concepts.
-Leslie Lamport
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
-Doug Linder
In programming, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.
-Paul Graham
The best smells are something that's easy to spot and most of time lead you to really interesting problems. Data classes (classes with all data and no behavior) are good examples of this. You look at them and ask yourself what behavior should be in this class.
A good programmer looks both ways before crossing a one-way street
Behavior is the most important thing about software. It is what users depend on. Users like it when we add behavior (provided it is what they really wanted), but if we change or remove behavior they depend on (introduce bugs), they stop trusting us.
Make it correct, make it clear, make it concise, make it fast. In that order.
Wes Dyer
Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the languages of interaction
-Don Norman
When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop
-Alan Perlis
It's not at all important to get it right the first time. It's vitally important to get it right the last time.
-Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it's going to run. And if it doesn't, it'll be easy to make it fast.
-Joshua Bloch
Programmers are as emotional and irrational as normal people.
-Douglas Crockford
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.
-Richard Pattis
Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.”
-Ray Ozzie
We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.
-Jeff Atwood
Prolific developers don’t always write a lot of code, instead they solve a lot of problems. The two things are not the same.
- J. Chambers
Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray.
- Sam Redwine
A cache with a bad policy is another name for a memory leak.
The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it. ⠀
-Pamela Zave
Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence.
-Niklaus Wirth
It is very hard to predict, especially the future.
-Niels Bohr
This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.
-Wietse Venema
Pay attention to zeros. If there is a zero, someone will divide by it.
-Cem Kaner
Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
-Donald Knuth
"In a purely functional program, the value of a [constant] never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!"
Alejandro writes interesting content on software development and machine learning.
He teaches Computer Science and his content is great.
I love interacting with him.
Allen is a DDD passionate. His opinions are very strong and accurate.
I enjoy his development tips AND management and agile humor a lot.
I liked very much his courses on LinkedIn.
1 - Check your phone after a couple of hours.
2 - Keep an eye on the app with the most notifications
3 - Block them
4 - Don't fear #FOMO. Deal with it
5 - Repeat once a day.
1 - Use blocks of time without interruptions (timeboxing).
2 - My favorite is @PomodoroTech.
3 - if you come across new tasks just write them down.
4 - Don't multitask.
5 - You cannot switch until time is up.
6 - 25 minutes it's a good slice.
Solutions: 1) Refactor methods 2) Rename methods to more declarative unes 3) break methods 4) If a comment describe what a method does. Just name the method with this description