We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals. Not just anyone, with any background, or any training, can do a fine job of programming. Programmers know this, but then why is it that they think that anyone picked off the street can do documentation? One has only to spend an hour looking at papers written by graduate students to realize the extent to which the ability to communicate is not universally held. And so, when we speak about computer program documentation, we are not speaking about the psychology of computer programming at all - except insofar as programmers have the illusion that anyone can do a good job of documentation, provided he is not smart enough to be a programmer.
Gerald Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming
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Related quotes
Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
quote by Linus Torvalds
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Goto, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.
quote by Ray Simard
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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.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
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It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
quote by Edsger Dijkstra
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Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming.
quote by Niklaus Wirth
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Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming.
quote by John Carmack
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The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.
Don't count out other amazing programming like Frontline. You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet.
quote by Gwen Ifill
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The second stream of material that is going to come out of this project is a programming environment and a set of programming tools where we really want to focus again on the needs of the newbie. This environment is going to have to be extremely user-friendly.
quote by Guido van Rossum
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Obviously with the onset of cable and satellite, there are more opportunities for programming and original programming, so it creates more opportunities for actors and producers and directors and everything.
quote by Anthony Michael Hall
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An apprentice carpenter may want only a hammer and saw, but a master craftsman employs many precision tools. Computer programming likewise requires sophisticated tools to cope with the complexity of real applications, and only practice with these tools will build skill in their use.
Robert L. Kruse in Data Structures and Program Design
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If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.
quote by Shawn Fanning
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The fact that the same symbolic programming primitives work for those as work for math kinds of things, I think, really validates the idea of symbolic programming being something pretty general.
quote by Stephen Wolfram
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Real programmers don't write in PLI. PLI is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.
Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.
quote by John Carmack
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What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
quote by Steve Wozniak
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What did you do?
'no no i have given
to each of them
seven senses. check
check check on them, '
the maker said.
'yes but this one has
only four and this one
three and this one five, '
the checker replied.
'See whether it has been
placed too near fire
Or if fsomeone has messed
up its inner scheme of things?
a short circuit? Some mess up
the programming?
Too much of one sense
might crowd out the others.
Too much of programming
might get it all haywired too.'
.
'But I think it not only has
lesser sense but is walking
away totally from what it
should be? '
.
poem by John Tiong Chunghoo
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I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.
quote by Marc Wallice
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Nine Billion Names Of God
Once nine billion names of God were known
the world would end, the monks declared.
When scientists transferred them from a stone
on which He’d written them, they then compared
these names to those of all the stars astronomers
had managed to discover, and thus found
a proof their names were all eponymous,
based on a God, who out of sight and sound,
left traces in the starry sky that He
exists, the Founder of the universe.
Once this was known, they could no longer see
the stars, which He extinguished with a curse,
because although He challenges us to know
His names, He does not want us to find out
precisely where the trees of knowledge grow,
because His universe is based on doubt.
Dennis Overbye (“A Boy’s Life, Guided by the Cosmic Wonder, ” NYT, March 25,2007) writes about the science fiction writer and space visionary, the co-creator with Stanley Kubrick of the classic 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Overbye, who was greatly influenced by Clarke’s writings which he describes as the ultimate reason why he ended up becoming an MIT graduate, reports that a supernova exploded in the constellation Boötes on the day of Clarke’s death:
It was the remains of a cataclysmic explosion, a gamma-ray burst, that must have torched a galaxy seven billion light-years away, around the curve of the cosmos, as Clarke might have put it. Nobody knows if there could have been somebody or something living there, when the universe was half its present age. When I heard about it I couldn’t help thinking about Clarke’s Jesuit and the star of Bethlehem. Whoever or whatever was there now belongs to the ages. Darkness has now reclaimed that spot in the sky.
Overbye also writes:
In his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God, ” published in 1953, Clarke wrote of a pair of computer programmers sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. Once the list was complete, the monks believed, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end. The programmers are fleeing the mountain, hoping to escape the monks’ wrath when the program finishes and the world is still there, when one of them looks up. “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
3/25/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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I have always been making art from an early age but for nearly forty years did computer programming to earn a living. I bought a house and put my wife and three children through college. Now that diversion is over so I can finally paint full time.
quote by Mike Thompson
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