Quotes

… mostly on software engineering, but not only.

“How does a project get to be a year late?…One day at a time.” — The Mytical Man Month

“Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test. […] Each of us should […] explore and embrace techniques to reduce complexity.”  — Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Saint-Exupéry

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” — D. Knuth

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it” — D. Knuth

“Research is less about discovering the fantastic, as it is about revealing the obvious. The obvious is always there. It needs no discovery. It only needs us to take a look from a different perspective to see it.” — On T. Girba’s blog

“It is impossible for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.” — P. Fermat

“These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” — Groucho Marx

“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…”  — B. Baruch

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” — Jim Rohn.

“If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”  —  Woodrow Wilson

“The devil is in the details” — German proverb quote

“The first idea is always wrong” — Popular wisdom

“What can go wrong will go wrong” — Murphy’s law

“The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

“The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.” — Warren Bennis

“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” — Dan Stanford

“A mission is something that you do in a bounded amount of time with bounded resources. A purpose is something that you never achieve.” — William Cook

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” — Martin Fowler

“The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.” — E.W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

“There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think” — Richard Hamming

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” — Brian Kernighan

“If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.” — Newton

“Rules of thumb are sometimes what their acronym infers…ROT” — unknown

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.” — Albert Einstein

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” — Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.” — Tony Hoare

“He who hasn’t hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain.” — John Moore

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” — A. Einstein

“There are two groups of languages: those which everyone hates and those which nobody uses.” — Unknown

“Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection” — David Wheeler

“Idiomatic usage often matters more than what is strictly possible.” — A comment from Stuart Halloway

“You learn lisp for the same reason you learn latin. It won’t get you a job but it will improve your mind” — Paul Graham

“The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor.” —John Allen Paulos

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things” — Phil Karlton

“Some abstraction is great, but eventually you need to write code that does something useful.” — Bill Karwin

“Tell me, I forget. Show me, I remember. Involve me, I understand.” — Chinese proverb.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you want to learn about wheels.” — Popular wisdom

“I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one”  — Mark Twain

“To be trusted is a greater compliement than to be loved” — George Mcdonald

“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit” — George Carlin

“Find your obsession, make it your profession, and you’ll never work a day in your life” — Unknown

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” — James Cameron

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein

“Tools can enable change in behavior and eventually change culture” — Patrick Debois

“First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you’re ready to engineer.” — @KentBeck

“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” — Alan Perlis

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” – Peter F. Drucker