Quotes4study

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Bill Gates

Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever.

Napoleon I of France

I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

Unknown

Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress.

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems

To write good code is a worthy challenge, and a source of civilized delight.

stolen and paraphrased from William Safire

Lenin’s and Stalin’s form of communism is gone, yet its trappings have been expropriated by mega-corporations. We have companies featuring central planning by troikas, mission statements crafted by apparatchiks, five-year plans, no right to choose leaders in companies, no democracy in the workplace, a clear distinction between intelligentsia and peasants (top CEOs make 152 times the median salary and enjoy company dachas, jets, and limos), and state monitoring (time clocks, dress codes, drug screening, “employee assistance” plans, e-mail monitoring, no smoking, and other personal conduct rules, as well as family-life audits).

Ricardo Semler

As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code.

Unknown

Whatever problem the other person has, codependency involves a habitual system of thinking, feeling, and behaving toward ourselves and others that can cause us pain. Codependent behaviors or habits are self-destructive. We frequently react to people who are destroying themselves; we

Melody Beattie

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Martin Fowler

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The canon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor and reign at the universities, but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.--_Balzac._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

If you cannot grok the overall structure of a program while taking a shower, e.g., with no external memory aids, you are not ready to code it.

Richard Pattis

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.

Richard Pattis

Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.

Unknown

Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.

Unknown

The greatness of man even in his sensuality, to have known how to extract from it an admirable code, and to have drawn from it a picture of love to others.

Blaise Pascal     The Thoughts of Blaise Pascal

Real programmers don't comment their code.  It was hard to write, it

should be hard to understand.

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

Martin Golding

A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation.

Unknown

The lottery is a tax on poor people and on people who can’t do math. Rich people and smart people would be in the line if the lottery were a real wealth-building tool, but the truth is that the lottery is a rip-off instituted by our government. This is not a moral position; it is a mathematical, statistical fact. Studies show that the zip codes that spend four times what anyone else does on lottery tickets are those in lower-income parts of town. The lottery, or gambling of any kind, offers false hope, not a ticket out.

Dave Ramsey

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious — that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code; film adaptation released worldwide on 19 May 2006

Religion and morality, as they now stand, compose a practical code of misery and servitude.... How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image, should she look into the mirror of Nature!

_Shelley._

The history of the human race has generated several papers articulating basic moral imperatives, or fundamental principles, of human coexistence that… substantially influenced the fate of humanity on this planet. Among these historic documents, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights … holds a very special, indeed, unique position. It is the first code of ethical conduct that was not a product of one culture, or one sphere of civilization only, but a universal creation, shaped and subscribed to by representatives of all humankind. Since its very inception, the Declaration has thus represented a planetary, or global commitment, a global intention, a global guideline. For this reason alone, this exceptional document — conceived as a result of a profound human self-reflection in the wake of the horrors of World War II, and retaining its relevance ever since — deserves to be remembered today.

Václav Havel (quote from a speech on the 50th anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, 10 December 1948

1: No code table for op: ++post

Unknown

In the divine commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," if well understood, is comprised the whole Hebrew decalogue, with Solon's and Lycurgus's constitutions, Justinian's pandects, the Code Napoleon, and all codes, catechisms, divinities, moralities whatsoever that man has devised (and enforced with altar-fire and gallows-ropes) for his social guidance.

_Carlyle._

"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong."

Norm Schryer

Real computer scientists don't comment their code.  The identifiers are

so long they can't afford the disk space.

"In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not

there if you want to keep writing good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer

The civilised man lives not in wheeled houses. He builds stone castles, plants lands, makes life-long marriage contracts; has long-dated, hundred-fold possessions, not to be valued in the money-market; has pedigrees, libraries, law-codes; has memories and hopes, even for this earth, that reach over thousands of years.

_Carlyle._

Mastering the lawless science of our law,-- That codeless myriad of precedent, That wilderness of single instances.

ALFRED TENNYSON. 1809- ----.     _Aylmer's Field._

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.

William Faulkner

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.

Dan Salomon

COMPASS [for the CDC-6000 series] is the sort of assembler one expects from

a corporation whose president codes in octal.

Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.

Frank Herbert in Chapterhouse : Dune

: These are the precepts of the law: to live honestly, to harm no one, to render each his due. ( Iuris pr?cepta sunt h?c: honeste vivere, alterum non l?dere, suum cuique tribuere. ) [ Corpus Iuris Civilis AD 533—Law Code of Justinian.]

Justinian

But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly condemned by every ethical code, its chief and worst defect in the particular case we are now examining, the growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat, is the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives of men: the putting power over the proletariat into the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency and credit without which that proletariat could not be fed and clothed and maintained in work. [ The Crisis of Civilization, Being the Matter of a Course of Lectures Delivered at Fordham University, 1937 . Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1991, p. 124.]

Belloc, Hilaire.

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

Norm Schryer

: Justice is the constant and eternal purpose that renders to each his due. (Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi.) [ Corpus Iuris Civilis AD 533 — Law Code of Justinian.]

Justinian

Such graves as his are pilgrim shrines, Shrines to no code or creed confined,-- The Delphian vales, the Palestines, The Meccas of the mind.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. 1790-1867.     _Burns._

Your code should be more efficient!

Unknown

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Donald Knuth

Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, the day's work.

_Emerson._

"Little else matters than to write good code."

Karl Lehenbauer

A final word should be said concerning the status of free blacks. Before the American Revolution this status had been ambiguous, and the number of free blacks was insignificant. <...> A rash of new laws, similar to the later Black Codes of Reconstruction, reduced free blacks almost to the status of slaves without masters. The new laws regulated their freedom of movement, forbade them to associate with slaves, subjected them to surveillance and discipline by whites, denied them the legal right to testify in court against whites, required them to work at approved jobs, and threatened them with penal labor if not actual reenslavement.

David Brion Davis

Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.

Dave Olson

If you honour a vile man, you disgrace the code of honour.

John Wortabet     Arabian Wisdom

Most codes extend their definitions of treason to acts not really against one’s country. They do not distinguish between acts against the government, and acts against the oppressions of the government. The latter are virtues, yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former, because real treasons are rare; oppressions frequent. The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries. [ Report on Spanish Convention , 1792.]

Jefferson, Thomas.

The number of computer scientists in a room is inversely proportional

to the number of bugs in their code.

Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.

Eagleson's Law

Don't get suckered in by the comments -- they can be terribly misleading.

Debug only code.

"An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of code."

an anonymous programmer

I don't consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first.

Tahereh Mafi

Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, about debugging

C Code.  C Code Run.  Run, Code, RUN!

PLEASE!!!!

Alpha sets the scale of nature -- the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science had found Nature's PIN Code.

Frank Close

All that is best in the ethics of the modern world, in so far as it has not Grown out of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the direct development of the ethics of old Israel. There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the weak and poor, as the Jewish law; and, if the Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth himself declared that he taught nothing but that which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious and ethical system of his people.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

    A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial

package.

    The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master

reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a set

of generalized graphics routines, and artificial intelligence interface,

but not the slightest mention of anything financial.

    When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant.

"Don't be so impatient," he said, "I'll put the financial stuff in eventually."

        -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Fortune Cookie

A Code of Honour: never approach a friend's girlfriend or wife with mischief

as your goal.  There are too many women in the world to justify that sort of

dishonourable behaviour.  Unless she's really attractive.

        -- Bruce J. Friedman, "Sex and the Lonely Guy"

Fortune Cookie

            It's grad exam time...

COMPUTER SCIENCE

    Inside your desk you'll find a listing of the DEC/VMS operating

system in IBM 1710 machine code. Show what changes are necessary to convert

this code into a UNIX Berkeley 7 operating system.  Prove that these fixes are

bug free and run correctly. You should gain at least 150% efficiency in the

new system.  (You should take no more than 10 minutes on this question.)

MATHEMATICS

    If X equals PI times R

2, construct a formula showing how long

it would take a fire ant to drill a hole through a dill pickle, if the

length-girth ratio of the ant to the pickle were 98.17:1.

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

Describe the Universe.  Give three examples.

     Fortune Cookie

#define NULL 0           /* silly thing is, we don't even use this */

        -- Larry Wall in perl.c from the perl source code</p>

Fortune Cookie

===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

Compiler optimizations have been made to macro expand LET into a WITHOUT-

INTERRUPTS special form so that it can PUSH things into a stack in the

LET-OPTIMIZATION area, SETQ the variables and then POP them back when it's

done.  Don't worry about this unless you use multiprocessing.

Note that LET *could* have been defined by:

    (LET ((LET '`(LET ((LET ',LET))

            ,LET)))

    `(LET ((LET ',LET))

        ,LET))

This is believed to speed up execution by as much as a factor of 1.01 or

3.50 depending on whether you believe our friendly marketing representatives.

This code was written by a new programmer here (we snatched him away from

Itty Bitti Machines where he was writing COUGHBOL code) so to give him

confidence we trusted his vows of "it works pretty well" and installed it.

Fortune Cookie

...Veloz is indistinguishable from hundreds of other electronics businesses

in the Valley, run by eager young engineers poring over memory dumps late

into the night.  The difference is that a bunch of self-confessed "car nuts"

are making money doing what they love: writing code and driving fast.

        -- "Electronics puts its foot on the gas", IEEE Spectrum, May 88

Fortune Cookie

pos += screamnext[pos]  /* does this goof up anywhere? */

        -- Larry Wall in util.c from the perl source code</p>

Fortune Cookie

They told me you had proven it        When they discovered our results

    About a month before.            Their hair began to curl

The proof was valid, more or less    Instead of understanding it

    But rather less than more.        We'd run the thing through PRL.

He sent them word that we would try    Don't tell a soul about all this

    To pass where they had failed        For it must ever be

And after we were done, to them        A secret, kept from all the rest

    The new proof would be mailed.        Between yourself and me.

My notion was to start again

    Ignoring all they'd done

We quickly turned it into code</p>

    To see if it would run.

Fortune Cookie

<Knghtbrd> the problem with the GNU coding standards is they ASSUME that

       everyone in the world uses emacs..  If that were the case, free

           software would die because we would all have wrist problems

       like RMS by now and no longer be able to code.  ;>

Fortune Cookie

<Knghtbrd> QF is going to get zipfile support today

<;Coderjoe&gt; heh... infozip?

<Knghtbrd> If I'm lucky yes

<Deek> knghtbrd: You're kidding, right? ;)

* Deek takes away Knghtbrd's crack pipe. ;)

Fortune Cookie

Engram, n.:

    1. The physical manifestation of human memory -- "the engram."

2. A particular memory in physical form.  [Usage note:  this term is no longer

in common use.  Prior to Wilson and Magruder's historic discovery, the nature

of the engram was a topic of intense speculation among neuroscientists,

psychologists, and even computer scientists.  In 1994 Professors M. R. Wilson

and W. V. Magruder, both of Mount St. Coax University in Palo Alto, proved

conclusively that the mammalian brain is hardwired to interpret a set of

thirty seven genetically transmitted cooperating TECO macros.  Human memory

was shown to reside in 1 million Q-registers as Huffman coded uppercase-only

ASCII strings.  Interest in the engram has declined substantially since that

time.]

        -- New Century Unabridged English Dictionary,

           3rd edition, 2007 A.D.

Fortune Cookie

Processed at location stamped in code at top of carton.

Fortune Cookie

Nothing is a problem once you debug the code.

        -- John Carmack

Fortune Cookie

COMPASS [for the CDC-6000 series] is the sort of assembler one expects from

a corporation whose president codes in octal.

        -- J. N. Gray

Fortune Cookie

We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.

We believe in: rough consensus and working code.

        -- Dave Clark

Fortune Cookie

    A novice asked the Master: "Here is a programmer that never designs,

documents, or tests his programs.  Yet all who know him consider him one of

the best programmers in the world.  Why is this?"

    The Master replies: "That programmer has mastered the Tao.  He has

gone beyond the need for design; he does not become angry when the system

crashes, but accepts the universe without concern.  He has gone beyond the

need for documentation; he no longer cares if anyone else sees his code.  He

has gone beyond the need for testing; each of his programs are perfect within

themselves, serene and elegant, their purpose self-evident.  Truly, he has

entered the mystery of the Tao."

        -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Fortune Cookie

In the early morning queue,

With a listing in my hand.

With a worry in my heart,    There on terminal number 9,

Waitin' here in CERAS-land.    Pascal run all set to go.

I'm a long way from sleep,    But I'm waitin' in the queue,

How I miss a good meal so.    With this code that ever grows.

In the early mornin' queue,    Now the lobby chairs are soft,

With no place to go.        But that can't make the queue move fast.

                Hey, there it goes my friend,

                I've moved up one at last.

        -- Ernest Adams, "Early Morning Queue", to "Early

           Morning Rain" by G. Lightfoot

Fortune Cookie

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.   :-)

        -- Larry Wall in  <8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>

Fortune Cookie

My CODE of ETHICS is vacationing at famed SCHROON LAKE in upstate New York!!

Fortune Cookie

<Deek> you GPL your homework? :)

<knghtbrd> yah  =D

<knghtbrd> Anyone is permitted to use or modify my homework, but if they

           distribute changes they must include the full machine-readable

           source code ;>

Fortune Cookie

 * Equivalent code is available from RSA Data Security, Inc.

 * This code has been tested against that, and is equivalent,

 * except that you don't need to include two pages of legalese

 * with every copy.

        -- public domain MD5 source

Fortune Cookie

If a system is administered wisely,

its users will be content.

They enjoy hacking their code</p>

and don't waste time implementing

labor-saving shell scripts.

Since they dearly love their accounts,

they aren't interested in other machines.

There may be telnet, rlogin, and ftp,

but these don't access any hosts.

There may be an arsenal of cracks and malware,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy reading their mail,

take pleasure in being with their newsgroups,

spend weekends working at their terminals,

delight in the doings at the site.

And even though the next system is so close

that users can hear its key clicks and biff beeps,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

Fortune Cookie

===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

CAR and CDR now return extra values.

The function CAR now returns two values.  Since it has to go to the trouble

to figure out if the object is carcdr-able anyway, we figured you might as

well get both halves at once.  For example, the following code shows how to

destructure a cons (SOME-CONS) into its two slots (THE-CAR and THE-CDR):

    (MULTIPLE-VALUE-BIND (THE-CAR THE-CDR) (CAR SOME-CONS) ...)

For symmetry with CAR, CDR returns a second value which is the CAR of the

object.  In a related change, the functions MAKE-ARRAY and CONS have been

fixed so they don't allocate any storage except on the stack.  This should

hopefully help people who don't like using the garbage collector because

it cold boots the machine so often.

Fortune Cookie

A CODE OF ETHICAL BEHAVIOR FOR PATIENTS:

4. DO NOT COMPLAIN IF THE TREATMENT FAILS TO BRING RELIEF.

    You must believe that your doctor has achieved a deep insight into

    the true nature of your illness, which transcends any mere permanent

    disability you may have experienced.

5. NEVER ASK YOUR DOCTOR TO EXPLAIN WHAT HE IS DOING OR WHY HE IS DOING IT.

    It is presumptuous to assume that such profound matters could be

    explained in terms that you would understand.

6. SUBMIT TO NOVEL EXPERIMANTAL TREATMENT READILY.

    Though the surgery may not benefit you directly, the resulting

    research paper will surely be of widespread interest.

Fortune Cookie

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

        -- Donald Knuth

Fortune Cookie

Double Bucky, you're the one,

You make my keyboard so much fun,

Double Bucky, an additional bit or two, (Vo-vo-de-o)

Control and meta, side by side,

Augmented ASCII, 9 bits wide!

Double Bucky, a half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!

Oh, I sure wish that I,

Had a couple of bits more!

Perhaps a set of pedals to make the number of bits four.

Double Double Bucky!  Double Bucky left and right

OR'd together, outta sight!

Double Bucky, I'd like a whole word of,

Double Bucky, I'm happy I heard of,

Double Bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

        -- to Nicholas Wirth, who suggested that an extra bit

        be added to terminal codes on 36-bit machines for use

        by screen editors.  [to the tune of "Rubber Ducky"]

Fortune Cookie

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