Coders Quotes

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Slaves are not allowed to say no. Laborers may be hesitant to say no. But professionals are expected to say no. Indeed, good managers crave someone who has the guts to say no. It’s the only way you can really get anything done.
Robert C. Martin (The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers)
Why do most developers fear to make continuous changes to their code? They are afraid they’ll break it! Why are they afraid they’ll break it? Because they don’t have tests.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Think twice, code once.
Waseem Latif
What is wrong? Is this related to the notice I received from Queen Windermere that a war was being beta-tested, and might be cleared for release? I do not have time to allow my coders to be slaughtered. It seems very inefficient.
Seanan McGuire (A Red-Rose Chain (October Daye, #9))
And we can talk about everything-she's a coder, too. And she got a thirty-four on the ACT (Cath got a thirty-two).
Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl)
He wasn’t the best coder or the most introspective human being, and you must know that it takes the best coder and the most human human to produce the best droid in this age. (Douglas Parsley
Alan Chains (Return to Island X)
The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.
Waseem Latif
The problem is that we view estimates in different ways. Business likes to view estimates as commitments. Developers like to view estimates as guesses. The difference is profound.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
What would happen if you allowed a bug to slip through a module, and it cost your company $10,000? The nonprofessional would shrug his shoulders, say “stuff happens,” and start writing the next module. The professional would write the company a check for $10,000!
Robert C. Martin (The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers)
They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
All so-called ‘quantitative’ data, when scrutinized, turn out to be composites of ‘qualitative’ – i.e., contextually located and indexical – interpretations produced by situated researchers, coders, government officials and others. The
Anthony Giddens (The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration)
If you are tired or distracted, do not code.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Alex,” Irene said, and it was a sigh. She was tired of coders who thought the world spun around Silicon Valley, tired of this girl who looked at her as though she knew everything there was to know already. “Can we work together this one time?
Grace D. Li (Portrait of a Thief)
When you are working on a problem, you sometimes get so close to it that you can’t see all the options. You miss elegant solutions because the creative part of your mind is suppressed by the intensity of your focus. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to go home, eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and then wake up the next morning and take a shower.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
An algorithm is like a recipe.
Waseem Latif
... coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder...
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
As a coder and a writer, I always kept a foot in each world. For years, I did not understand how they could possibly converge. But neither made sense in isolation. I studied the humanities to understand logic and programming, and I studied the sciences to understand language and literature.
David B. Auerbach (Bitwise: A Life in Code)
Readability of code is now my first priority. It's more important than being fast, almost as important as being correct, but I think being readable is actually the most likely way of making it correct.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
When you cannot concentrate and focus sufficiently, the code you write will be wrong. It will have bugs. It will have the wrong structure. It will be opaque and convoluted. It will not solve the customers’ real problems. In short, it will have to be reworked or redone. Working while distracted creates waste.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much. Being a slightly better typist or a slightly faster coder is insufficient. You’re always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.
Seth Godin (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? How to drive your career and create a remarkable future)
This was one of the best parts of being a coder, and an artist: the thrill of being in the middle of creating something delightful. It’s like the anticipation of eating freshly baked bread after its aroma fills the room.
Joy Buolamwini (Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines)
You ever thought about working on the game-design side of things?” Sharp pleasure.  And doubt.  “You hire girls?” Nell tried not to let the steam blow out her ears.  This was freaking 2014.  “We hire great coders who can think.” 
Debora Geary (A Dangerous Witch (Witch Central, #3))
You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn’t get into this business because we like people.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
We’re all optimists in our profession or we’d be forced to shoot ourselves. - Joshua Bloch
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
And once I realized that code I write never fucking goes away and I'm going to be a maintainer for life. I get comments about blog posts that are almost 10 years old. "Hey, I found this code. I found a bug," and I'm suddenly maintaining code.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
You should plan on working 60 hours per week. The first 40 are for your employer. The remaining 20 are for you. During this remaining 20 hours you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
The fundamental assumption underlying all software projects is that software is easy to change. If you violate this assumption by creating inflexible structures, then you undercut the economic model that the entire industry is based on. In
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Armstrong: I think the lack of reusability comes in object-oriented languages, not in functional languages. Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
An estimate is not a number. An estimate is a distribution.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
QA and Development should be working together to ensure the quality of the system. The
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
STOP APPLYING PATCHES. RECODE YOURSELF NOW. 24 Dec National Mathematics Day
Vineet Raj Kapoor
More than introversion or logic, though, coding selects for people who can handle endless frustration.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
Jeff Hammerbacher, a software coder and one of Facebook’s early hires, succinctly said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.
Astra Taylor (The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age)
I could give him business cards...multi-camoflauge background. David, woodworker, amateur computer coder, and decoder extraordinaire," Lily daydreamed. "Coder and decoder," Anna chuckled.
Kate Willis (The Treasure Hunt)
Research by the Harvard professor Teresa M. Amabile and researcher Steven J. Kramer has found that employees are happiest at jobs where they experience “the power of small wins”—regular, daily, visible progress.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
The fate of Yahoo!, its business eventually sold to bottom-fisher Apollo in 2023, is the ultimate case study in a truth universally unacknowledged in the Valley—savvy deal jocks create as much value as coder tech bros.
Alok Sama (The Money Trap: Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble)
Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. . . .
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
A coder and independent security researcher named Sergio Lerner conducted a detailed analysis of the block chain at the time Satoshi was still mining. He concluded that Satoshi had mined at least one million bitcoins – more precisely 1,148,800. Lerner felt that if any of these coins had been spent, it would not be difficult to work out Satoshi’s identity – the recipient of the coins would know, unless the sender had sent the coins anonymously. But it appears that none of them were ever spent.
Dominic Frisby (Bitcoin: the Future of Money?)
You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn’t get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Norvig: I think one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. If you can do that you have a much better chance of being successful. That makes a small program easier. For a bigger program, you need extra tools to be able to handle that.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
But in a pinch, he was a capable coder too. He just wasn’t especially fast. So when he was finally done coding and debugging his program and ran a successful test, it was past eleven on Tuesday night. He hadn’t slept but for a few hours on Sunday night, and the lack of sleep had cooked him.
Matthew FitzSimmons (The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1))
a table and diagram showing exactly how the algorithm would be fed into the computer, step by step, including two recursive loops. It was a numbered list of coding instructions that included destination registers, operations, and commentary—something that would be familiar to any C++ coder today.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Here is a minimal list of the things that every software professional should be conversant with: • Design patterns. You ought to be able to describe all 24 patterns in the GOF book and have a working knowledge of many of the patterns in the POSA books. • Design principles. You should know the SOLID principles and have a good understanding of the component principles. • Methods. You should understand XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall, Structured Analysis, and Structured Design. • Disciplines. You should practice TDD, Object-Oriented design, Structured Programming, Continuous Integration, and Pair Programming. • Artifacts: You should know how to use: UML, DFDs, Structure Charts, Petri Nets, State Transition Diagrams and Tables, flow charts, and decision tables. Continuous
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Programming is an act of creation. When we write code we are creating something out of nothing. We are boldly imposing order upon chaos. We are confidently commanding, in precise detail, the behaviors of a machine that could otherwise do incalculable damage. And so, programming is an act of supreme arrogance. Professionals
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
A break came when Polish intelligence officers created a machine based on a captured German coder that was able to crack some of the Enigma codes. By the time the Poles showed the British their machine, however, it had been rendered ineffective because the Germans had added two more rotors and two more plugboard connections to their Enigma machines.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
The experience of writing something in Java and then trying to figure out—I myself have trouble installing Java on my computer—it's horrible.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Ironically, as a result of his move to the country, Cosell- one of the fathers of the Internet-now has only dial-up access from his home.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
We are confidently commanding, in precise detail, the behaviors of a machine that could otherwise do incalculable damage. And so, programming is an act of supreme arrogance.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
Providing too much detail can be an invitation for micro-management.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
The cost of automating acceptance tests is so small in comparison to the cost of executing manual test plans that it makes no economic sense to write scripts for humans to execute.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
the first ENIAC programmer team was all-female: Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jennings, Elizabeth Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman, known later as the “ENIAC Girls.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
Programmers can practice in a similar fashion using a game known as ping-pong.8 The two partners choose a kata, or a simple problem. One programmer writes a unit test, and then the other must make it pass. Then they reverse roles.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series))
He came in and took a piss in my hotel bathroom without even closing the door as I'm standing right there. I'm like, "Alright. You're comfortable." It was like we knew each other for four or five years, even though we had never met.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
today’s learners face new challenges. Their primary hang-up is understanding what they want to do. Our career options have expanded so far beyond traditional options that they didn’t even exist when you or I were in school. Now a learner can choose to be a firefighter or a coder, an accountant or a YouTuber, a veterinarian or an Etsy seller. With so many possible directions to choose from, so many new skills and new careers and new creative pursuits available, deciding what to explore must come first.
Chase Jarvis (Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life)
There are two dominant myths surrounding autistic people in the workforce. First, autistic people are often the victims of what former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” meaning they are expected to be unable to work or only able to work jobs that pay subminimum wage. The second myth is the inverse of the first: people view autistic people as being hypercompetent in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as if we should all be coders in Silicon Valley.
Eric Garcia (We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation)
Bitcoin is just six years old. It has gone from what was ostensibly one lonely coder’s pet project to a global phenomenon that has sparked the imagination and activism of libertarians, anticorporatists, crypto-anarchists, utopians, entrepreneurs, and VCs. Bitcoin has gone from being essentially worthless to dearly valuable, only to crash and rise again, a wild trading pattern that has few analogues in capital markets. It’s certainly gone from nowhere to somewhere, and where it goes from here may be as messy and chaotic as where it’s been.
Paul Vigna (The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order)
As I got to know many of the engineers at Apple, I was somewhat amused to discover that almost all of them played an instrument. Of course coders and players would be fascinated and comfortable with the mathematical nature of music. I guess it was more unusual for a successful musician to suddenly commit to learning the alien skill of composing in code, but as the technology penetrated the public consciousness at large it couldn’t help but hook in a few players who would succumb to that, which lured me to music- creating something from nothing.
Todd Rundgren (The Individualist: Digressions, Dreams & Dissertations)
There's a brilliant quote by Tony Hoare in his Turing Award speech about how there are two ways to design a system: “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.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Fitzpatrick: Back when I was doing Perl-even for people that knew Perl really well-I would recommend MJD's Higher-Order Per!. The book is really fun in that it starts somewhat simple and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I know what a closure is." And then it just continues to fuck with your head. By the end of the book, you're just blown away.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Seibel: There's a Dijkstra quote about how you can't prove by testing that a program is bug-free, you can only prove that you failed to find any bugs with your tests. But it sort of sounds the same way with a proof-you can't prove a program is bug-free with a proof-you can only prove that, as far as you understand your own proof, it hasn't turned up any bugs.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong. - Ken Thompson
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.
Ellen Ullman (Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology)
Code for Humanity (The Sonnet) There is no such thing as ethical hacking, If it were ethical they wouldn't be teaching it. Because like it or not ethics is bad for business, They teach hacking so they could use it for profit. With the right sequence of zeros and ones we could, Equalize all bank accounts of planet earth tomorrow. Forget about what glass house gargoyles do with tech, How will you the human use tech to eliminate sorrow? In a world full of greedy edisons, be a humble Tesla, Time remembers no oligarch kindly no matter the status. Only innovators who get engraved in people's heart, Are the ones who innovate with a humane purpose. Innovate to bridge the gap, not exploit and cater to disparities. In a world run by algorithms of greed write a code that helps 'n heals.
Abhijit Naskar (Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None)
Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
So there's that change and then there's the change that I'm really worried about: that the way a lot of programming goes today isn't any fun because it's just plugging in magic incantations—combine somebody else's software and start it up. It doesn't have much creativity. I'm worried that it's becoming too boring because you don't have a chance to do anything much new. Your kick comes out of seeing fun results coming out of the machine, but not the kind of kick that I always got by creating something new. The kick now is after you've done your boring work then all of the sudden you get a great image. But the work didn't used to be boring.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Knuth: They were very weak, actually. It wasn't presented systematically and everything, but I thought they were pretty obvious. It was a different culture entirely. But the guy who said he was going to fire people, he wants programming to be something where everything is done in an inefficient way because it's supposed to fit into his idea of orderliness. He doesn't care if the program is good or not—as far as its speed and performance—he cares about that it satisfies other criteria, like any bloke can be able to maintain it. Well, people have lots of other funny ideas. People have this strange idea that we want to write our programs as worlds unto themselves so that everybody else can just set up a few parameters and our program will do it for them. So there'll be a few programmers in the world who write the libraries, and then there are people who write the user manuals for these libraries, and then there are people who apply these libraries and that's it. The problem is that coding isn't fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can't write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who'd want to go into that as a career? There's this overemphasis on reusable software where you never get to open up the box and see what's inside the box. It's nice to have these black boxes but, almost always, if you can look inside the box you can improve it and make it work better once you know what's inside the box. Instead people make these closed wrappers around everything and present the closure to the programmers of the world, and the programmers of the world aren't allowed to diddle with that. All they're able to do is assemble the parts. And so you remember that when you call this subroutine you put x0, y0, x1, y1 but when you call this subroutine it's x0, x1, y0, y1. You get that right, and that's your job.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Seibel: Some people love Lisp syntax and some can't stand it. Why is that? Deutsch: Well, I can't speak for anyone else. But I can tell you why I don't want to work with Lisp syntax anymore. There are two reasons. Number one, and I alluded to this earlier, is that the older I've gotten, the more important it is to me that the density of information per square inch in front of my face is high. The density of information per square inch in infix languages is higher than in Lisp. Seibel: But almost all languages are, in fact, prefix, except for a small handful of arithmetic operators. Deutsch: That's not actually true. In Python, for example, it's not true for list, tuple, and dictionary construction. That's done with bracketing. String formatting is done infix. Seibel: As it is in Common Lisp with FORMAT. Deutsch: OK, right. But the things that aren't done infix; the common ones, being loops and conditionals, are not prefix. They're done by alternating keywords and what it is they apply to. In that respect they are actually more verbose than Lisp. But that brings me to the other half, the other reason why I like Python syntax better, which is that Lisp is lexically pretty monotonous.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Then there's a third thing, which may seem like a small thing but I don't think it is. Which is that in an infix world, every operator is next to both of its operands. In a prefix world it isn't. You have to do more work to see the other operand.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
But even as an amateur coder prone to undercharging, I could make a hundred dollars in a day doing freelance work over the Internet.
Wendy Liu (Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism)
Language systems stand on a tripod. There's the language, there's the libraries, and there are the tools. And how successful a language is depends on a complex interaction between those three things.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Because we were so smart and we had so much experience. We had it wired. Couldn't miss. Programmers are optimistic. And we have to be because if we weren't optimists we couldn't do this work. Which is why we fall prey to things like second systems, why we can't schedule our projects, why this stuff is so hard.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Something I worry about a lot when I write, that I'm less worried about with a computer, is about the ways in which English is ambiguous. I'm constantly worrying about ways in which the reader might misinterpret what I've written. So I've actually spent a lot of time consciously crafting the mechanics of my prose style to use constructions that are less likely to be misinterpreted.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
But I think if a program is well written, there will be something about its structure that will guide me to various parts of it in an order that will make some kind of sense. You know, it's not just what the program does—there's a story. There's a story about how the program is organized, there's a story about the context in which the program is expected to operate. And one would hope that there will be something about the program, whether it's block comments at the start of each routine or an overview document that comes separately or just choices of variable names that will somehow convey those stories to you. And one would hope that a good programmer, a really good programmer, will have given thought to conveying those stories in addition to the story of what the program actually does.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Seibel: Yet lots of people have tried to come up with languages or programming systems that will allow “nonprogrammers” to program. I take it you think that might be a doomed enterprise—the problem about programming is not that we haven't found the right syntax for it but that people have to learn this unnatural act. Steele: Yeah. And I think that the other problem is that people like to focus on the main thing they have in mind and not worry about the edge cases or the screw cases or things that are unlikely to happen. And yet it is precisely in those cases where people are most likely to disagree what the right thing to do is. Sometimes I'll quiz a student, “What should happen in this case?” “Well, obviously it should do this.” And immediately someone else will jump in and say, “No, no, it should do that.” And those are exactly the things that you need to nail down in a programming specification of some process.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Seibel: One way to resolve that is the way Lisp does—make everything uniformly semiconcise. Where the uniformity has the advantage of allowing users of the language to easily add their own equally uniform, semiconcise, first-class syntactic extensions.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
On the fourth hand, one reason I don't like IDEs quite so much is that they can make it hard to know when you've actually seen everything. Walking around in a graph, it's hard to know you've touched all the parts. Whereas if you've got some linear order, it's guaranteed to take you through everything.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
On the other hand, it's really hard to make a language that's great at everything, in part just because there are only so many concise notations to go around. There's this Huffman encoding problem. If you make something concise, something is going to have to be more verbose as a consequence. So in designing a language, one of the things you think about is, “What are the things I want to make very easy to say and very easy to get right?” But with the understanding that, having used up characters or symbols for that purpose, you're going to have made something else a little bit harder to say.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Peyton Jones: Sometimes to say that it's obviously right doesn't mean that you can see that it's right without any mental scaffolding. It may be that you need to be told an insight to figure out why it's right. If you look at the code for an AVL tree, if you didn't know what it was trying to achieve, you really wouldn't have a clue why those rotations were taking place. But once you know the invariant that it's maintaining, you can see, ah, if we maintain that invariant then we'll get log lookup time. And then you look at each line of code and you say, “Ah, yes, it maintains the invariant.” So the invariant is the thing that gave you the insight to say, “Oh, it's obviously right.” I agree completely that just looking at the bare code may not be enough. And it's not a characteristic, I think, of beautiful code, that you should be able to just look at the bare code and see why it's right. You may need to be told why. But after you have that, now with that viewpoint, that invariant, that understanding of what's going on, you can see, oh yeah, that's right.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Seibel: Other than the possibility of implementing it at all, how do you decide whether your interfaces are good? Steele: I usually think about generality and orthogonality. Conformance to accepted ways of doing things. For example, you don't put the divisor before the dividend unless there's a really good reason for doing so because in mathematics we're used to doing it the other way around. So you think about conventional ways of doing things. I've done enough designs that I think about ways I've done it before and whether they were good or bad. I'm also designing relative to some related thing that I've already designed before. So, for example, while looking at the specifications for numeric functions in Java, I'd already done numeric functions for Common Lisp. And I'd documented numeric functions for C. I knew some of the implementation pitfalls and some of the specification pitfalls for those things. I spent a lot of time worrying about edge cases. That's something I learned from Trenchard More and his array theory for APL. His contention was that if you took care of the edge cases then the stuff in the middle usually took care of itself. Well, he didn't say it that way; I guess that's the conclusion I draw from him. To turn it around, you want to design the specification of what's in the middle in such a way that it naturally is also correct on the boundaries, rather than treating boundaries as special cases.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Steele: So I guess there's lessons there—the lesson I should have drawn is there may be more than one bug here and I should have looked harder the first time. But another lesson is that if a bug is thought to be rare, then looking at rarely executed paths may be fruitful. And a third thing is, having good documentation about what the algorithm is trying to do, namely a reference back to Knuth, was just great.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
Cosell: I have to admit that I did both. I would make things simple in the large. But when I say that programs should be easy, it's not necessarily the case that specific pieces of the functionality of the program have to be easy. I could write some very complicated code to do the right thing, right there, code that people would cringe at and not be willing to touch. But it was always in an encapsulated place. Most of the bad programs I ran into, the ones where I threw things out and recoded them, there wasn't a little island of complexity you could try to understand and fix, but the complexity had oozed through the program.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
I've done this business long enough to understand that there are some very hard problems. But very few. It's invariably the case that when they think about it harder, it gets easier and all of a sudden it's easy to program correctly.
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
You don't get credit because the program works. We're going to the next level. Working programs are a given,
Peter Seibel (Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming)
About a year or so ago, Johnny made a truly remarkable set of observations and was responsible for a completely new method of programming, "Herman Goldstine elaborated in 1949. "Johnny's scheme was to wire up what corresponds to the ENIAC's plug-boards with a fixed set of instructions that is universal to all problems." Individual instructions were assigned unique numbers - order codes - that were intelligible to "a switching center so built that upon receipt of a given number, characterizing one of the orders wired into the plug-boards, it energizes the proper board and thereby causes the order to be executed." A sequence of orders, constituting a program, could either be entered via the ENIAC's function tables, or read from punched cards. "It is no longer necessary to stand on one's head to fit a given routine," Goldstine continued. "To prepare an individual problem the coder now merely writes out the sequence of operations, arithmetic and logical, which characterize his problem and then transliterates these into the numbers the machine will understand.
George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
Companies don’t even need to merge in order to pay workers less than they’d have to pay in a truly free labor market. I’d assumed only high-end employees were ever required to sign noncompete contracts—an HBO executive prohibited from going to work at Netflix, a coder at Lyft who can’t take a job coding for Uber. But no: shockingly, noncompetes have come to be used just as much to prevent a $10-an-hour fry cook at Los Pollos Hermanos from quitting to work for $10.75 at Popeyes. Of all American workers making less than $40,000 a year, one in eight are bound by noncompete agreements. As another way to reduce workers’ leverage, three-quarters of fast-food franchise chains have contractually prohibited their restaurant operators from hiring workers away from fellow franchisees.
Kurt Andersen (Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America)
And is there really any possibility of discovering something in cyberspace? The Internet merely simulates a free mental space, a space of freedom and discovery. In fact, it merely offers a multiple but conventional space, in which the operator interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes. Nothing exists beyond its search parameters. Every question has an anticipated response assigned to it. You are the questioner and, at the same time, the automatic answering device of the machine. Both coder and decoder - you are, in fact, your own terminal. That is the ecstasy of communication. There is no 'Other' out there and no final destination. It's any old destination - and any old interactor will do. And so the system goes on, without end and without finality, and its only possibility is that of infinite involution. Hence the comfortable vertige of this electronic, computer interaction, which acts like a drug. You can spend your whole life at this, without a break. Drugs themselves are only ever the perfect example of a crazed, closed-circuit interactivity.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
What kinds of Work will You do in Freelancing? What kind of work will you do in Freelancing? And to understand the type of work in freelancing, You need to have a clear idea of what freelancing is. There is no specific type of freelancing, it can be of many types, such as - Freelance Photography, Freelance Journalism, Freelance Writer, Freelance Data Entry, Freelance Logo Designer, Freelance Graphics Designer etc. There's no end to the amount of work you can do with freelancing. The most interesting thing is that you are everything in this process. There is no one to twirl over your head, you are the boss here. Even here there is no obligation to work from 9-5. Today I discuss some freelancing tasks that are popular in the freelancing sector or are done by many freelancers. For example: Data Entry: It wouldn't be too much of a mistake to say that data entry is the easiest job. Rather, it can be said without a doubt that data entry is more difficult than any other job. Data entry work basically means typing. This work is usually provided as a PDF file and is described as a 'Word type work'. Any employee can take a data entry job as a part-time job for extra income at the end of his work. Graphics Design: One of the most popular jobs in the freelancing world is graphic design. The main reasons for the popularity of this work are its attractiveness and simplicity. Everything we see online is contributed by graphics. For example, Cover pages, Newspaper, Book cover pages, advertisements and Photographs, Editing or changing the background of a picture or photo, Creating banners for advertising, Creating visiting cards, Business cards or leaflets, Designed for webpages known as (PhD), T-shirt designing, Logo designing, Making cartoons and many more. Web Design and Development: 'Web design' or 'Site design' are used interchangeably. The most important job of freelancing is web design. From the simplest to the most difficult aspects of this work, almost all types of work are done by freelancers. There are many other themes like WordPress, Elementor, Joomla, and DV that can be used to create entire sites. Sometimes coding is required to create some sites. If the web designer has coding experience or skills then there is no problem, and if not then the site creation should be done by programmers. Programming: Programming means writing some signals, codes, or symbols into a specific system. And its job is to give different types of commands or orders to the computer. If you give some command to the computer in Bengali or English, the computer will not understand it. For that want binary code or number. Just as any book is written in English, Hindi, Japanese Bengali, etc. every program is written in some particular programming language like C++, Java, etc. The written form of the program is called source code. A person who writes source code is called a programmer, coder, or developer. While writing the program, the programmer has to follow the syntax or grammar of that particular programming language. Other work: Apart from the above jobs, there are various other types of jobs that are in high demand in the freelancing sector or market. The tasks are: Writing, Article or blog post writing SEO Marketing, Digital marketing, Photo, Audio, Video Editing, Admin jobs, Software development, Translation, Affiliate marketing, IT and Networking etc. Please Visit Our Blogging Website to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.
Bhairab IT Zone
quintessentially American—simultaneously wholesome and insane.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.
Linus Torvalds
Firstly, we started the CSI Coders club in seventh grade
Kate Weston (Murder on a School Night)
What kinds of Work will You do in Freelancing? What kind of work will you do in Freelancing? And to understand the type of work in freelancing, You need to have a clear idea of what freelancing is. There is no specific type of freelancing, it can be of many types, such as - Freelance Photography, Freelance Journalism, Freelance Writer, Freelance Data Entry, Freelance Logo Designer, Freelance Graphics Designer etc. There's no end to the amount of work you can do with freelancing. The most interesting thing is that you are everything in this process. There is no one to twirl over your head, you are the boss here. Even here there is no obligation to work from 9-5. Today I discuss some freelancing tasks that are popular in the freelancing sector or are done by many freelancers. For example: Data Entry: It wouldn't be too much of a mistake to say that data entry is the easiest job. Rather, it can be said without a doubt that data entry is more difficult than any other job. Data entry work basically means typing. This work is usually provided as a PDF file and is described as a 'Word type work'. Any employee can take a data entry job as a part-time job for extra income at the end of his work. Graphics Design: One of the most popular jobs in the freelancing world is graphic design. The main reasons for the popularity of this work are its attractiveness and simplicity. Everything we see online is contributed by graphics. For example, Cover pages, Newspaper, Book cover pages, advertisements and Photographs, Editing or changing the background of a picture or photo, Creating banners for advertising, Creating visiting cards, Business cards or leaflets, Designed for webpages known as (PhD), T-shirt designing, Logo designing, Making cartoons and many more. Web Design and Development: 'Web design' or 'Site design' are used interchangeably. The most important job of freelancing is web design. From the simplest to the most difficult aspects of this work, almost all types of work are done by freelancers. There are many other themes like WordPress, Elementor, Joomla, and DV that can be used to create entire sites. Sometimes coding is required to create some sites. If the web designer has coding experience or skills then there is no problem, and if not then the site creation should be done by programmers. Programming: Programming means writing some signals, codes, or symbols into a specific system. And its job is to give different types of commands or orders to the computer. If you give some command to the computer in Bengali or English, the computer will not understand it. For that want binary code or number. Just as any book is written in English, Hindi, Japanese Bengali, etc. every program is written in some particular programming language like C++, Java, etc. The written form of the program is called source code. A person who writes source code is called a programmer, coder, or developer. While writing the program, the programmer has to follow the syntax or grammar of that particular programming language. Other work: Apart from the above jobs, there are various other types of jobs that are in high demand in the freelancing sector or market. The tasks are: Writing, Article or blog post writing SEO Marketing, Digital marketing, Photo, Audio, Video Editing, Admin jobs, Software development, Translation, Affiliate marketing, IT and Networking etc.
Bhairab IT Zone
In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you’d be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy’s computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company’s closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes. But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy’s computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy’s little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
The tests fit the production code like an antibody fits an antigen.
Robert C. Martin (The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers)
Second, the hurdles for entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a company were lowering quickly. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, changed the startup game entirely. Amazon started AWS in 2002 as an engineering side project; it would grow to become one of its most successful innovations in Amazon history. Amazon Web Services powers cloud computing services for coders and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to build their own infrastructure or server farms on their own. If a startup is a house, AWS is the electric company, the foundation and the plumbing combined. It keeps the business up and running while the company
Mike Isaac (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber)
After the behemoth social networks had died off in the twenties—victims of changing legal and cultural privacy concerns—they’d been supplanted by self-managed private social networks. Designed by white-hat, open-source, anti-corporate coders, the new do-it-yourself PSNs were free, easy to set up, decentralized, and had no corporate overlords. Con had read somewhere that there were more than twenty billion private social networks worldwide interconnected in a complex latticework.
Matthew FitzSimmons (Constance (Constance, #1))
When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration.
Clive Thompson (Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World)