December One-liners: Programming Special!

Here are the new one-liners for December. This time it’s programming special, with a few sprinkles of less nerdy wisdom. Most of the quotes below are collected from the Twitter account Programming Wisdom. They’re not exactly haha-funny, but if you’re a programmer they should make you think. Enjoy!

• “It’s all talk until the code runs.” - Ward Cunningham
• “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” - Jan L.A van de Snepscheut
• I’ve got an idea for a really scary Halloween costume. How do I dress up as “The World Right Now”?
• “What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.” - Fred Brooks
• “Good software, like good wine, takes time.” - Joel Spolsky
• “Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.” - Filipe Fortes
• Trying again to persuade my wife to participate in a twosome.
• “We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” - Ellen Ullman
• “Think about it; and think about it carefully. Nothing happens in our society without software. Nothing.” - Robert “Uncle Bob Martin
• “I ran a half marathon” sounds so much better than “I quit halfway through a marathon”.
• “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.” - Alan J. Perlis
• “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Harold Abelson & Gerald Jay Sussman
• “Debugging time increases as a square of the program’s size.” - Chris Wenham
• “One of the best programming skills you can have is knowing when to walk away for awhile.” - Oscar Godson
• The trick to really enjoying someone’s company is to not spend a lot of time with them.
• “The strength of JavaScript is that you can do anything. The weakness is that you will.” - Reg Braithwaite
• “The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.” - Melinda Varian
• “A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.”- Niklaus Wirth
• “Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it.” - Patrick McKenzie
• Life doesn’t hand me lemons, it fires them at me rapidly from a lemon cannon.
• “The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.” - Eric Raymond
• “Looking at code you wrote more than two weeks ago is like looking at code you are seeing for the first time.”– Dan Hurvitz
• Having nutrition information on a bag of Cheetos is like having dating tips on a box of Crocs.