Recent posts
- Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
- A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
- The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
- Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve.
- A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
- Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date.
- The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
- Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
- Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
- No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.
- It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
- When we don’t understand a process, we fall into magical thinking about results.
- Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.
- Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.
- A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.
- Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry.
- Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
- In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't.
- One man's constant is another man's variable.
- Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.