A place to consolidate programming or tech quotes that I like.
It is not usually until you’ve built and used a version of the program that you understand the issues well enough to get the design right.
The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.
You don’t pay engineers to write code, you pay them to understand subtleties and edges of the problem. The code is incidental.
The art of debugging is figuring out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought you told it to do.
The fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts, and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of imagination
If it’s your decision, it’s design; if not, it’s a requirement.
The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can’t see the problem at all.
The hardest bugs are those where your mental model of the situation is just wrong, so you can’t see the problem at all.
Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will be able to express themselves clearly in comments.
Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
The act of describing a program in unambiguous detail and the act of programming are one and the same.