Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

Monday, January 30, 2012

A project that does healthy refactoring will be steadily deleting bad code. If nothing's deleted then it's almos certainly a sign that there isn't enough refactoring going on - which will lead to design degradation.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

And what about “nonrational”? That borders on insulting. Many programmers  would rather be accused of murder than be accused of being anything less than completely rational.

~ Andy Hunt

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. 

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computer systems is a sign of professional immaturity
~ Dijkstra