Programmer Attitude Quotes

Did that high-and-mighty attitude of yours come attached to you when you were spawned?! Was it a bug your programmer couldn't fix?!

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

If you are a politician, you don’t have a “secular” job. If you are a computer programmer, you don’t have a “secular” job. The term secular is defined as an attitude, activity, or thing that has no religious or spiritual basis. But there is nothing on the planet that God isn’t ruling over. Everything a believer touches and uses in a way that honors God is, in a sense, no longer “secular.

The RSS attitude of spurning the intellect and denouncing the intellectuals has worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy: since they left the intellectual field entirely to their enemies, the available intellectuals would not be “of any use to the nation”, meaning not sympathizing to the RSS programme. The political Hindu movement has paid a heavy price for this silly anti-intellectual prejudice.

Alan Turing appears to be becoming a symbol of the shift towards computing, not least because of his attitude of open-minded defiance of convention and conventional thinking. Not only did he conceptualise the modern computer – imagining a simple machine that could use different programmes – but he put his thinking into practice in the great code breaking struggle with the Nazis in World War II, and followed it up with pioneering early work in the mathematics of biology and chaos.

Some people mistakenly refer to software defects as bugs. When called bugs, they seem like pesky things that should be swatted or even ignored. This trivializes a critical problem and fosters a wrong attitude. Thus, when an engineer says there are only a few bugs left in a program, the reaction is one of relief. *Supposed, however, that we called them time bombs instead of bugs.* Would you feel the same sense of relief if a programmer told you that he had thoroughly tested a program and there were only a few time bombs left in it? Just using a different term changes your attitude entirely.

Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilisation programme was wrong; China’s one-child policy was wrong. These were sins of commission, not omission. Malthusian misanthropy – the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race – was wrong pragmatically as well as morally. The right thing to do about poor, hungry and fecund people always was, and still is, to give them hope, opportunity, freedom, education, food and medicine, including of course contraception, for not only will that make them happier, it will enable them to have smaller families.

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine. But a written program has another face, that which tells its story to the human user. For even the most private of programs, some such communication is necessary; memory will fail the author-user, and he will require refreshing on the details of his handiwork. How much more vital is the documentation for a public program, whose user is remote from the author in both time and space! For the program product, the other face to the user is fully as important as the face to the machine. Most of us have quietly excoriated the remote and anonymous author of some skimpily documented program. And many of us have therefore tried to instill in new programmers an attitude about documentation that would inspire for a lifetime, overcoming sloth and schedule pressure. By and large we have failed. I think we have used wrong methods.

Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’ This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.

learners receiving intensive ESL instruction for five hours every day for five months of one school year (in Grade 5 or 6) were compared to learners at the end of secondary school who had received the same total amount of instruction spread over 7–8 years of schooling. On a number of measures, the students who received the intensive instruction performed as well as or better than those whose instruction was delivered in what has been called a ‘drip feed’ approach (Lightbown and Spada 1994). In subsequent research, comparisons were made between groups of Grade 5 and 6 students who participated in intensive English language instruction during a single school year, but with the time distributed differently: some students received five hours of English a day for five months; others received the same total number of hours, doing two and a half hours of English each day for 10 months. The researchers found that both groups benefited from the overall increase in hours of instruction with some additional advantages for learners receiving the more intensive instruction (Collins et al. 1999; Collins and White 2011). The advantages were evident not only in superior language abilities but also in attitudes toward the language and satisfaction with language learning experiences. Similar findings have been reported for different models of intensive and core French programmes (Netten and Germain 2004; Lapkin, Hart, and Harley 1998).

W. Dijkstra, a leading theorist of programming, once summarized the prevalent attitudes toward code writing in the formative period of computing. He declared:   What about the poor programmer? Well, to tell the honest truth, he was hardly noticed. For one thing, the first machines were so bulky that you could hardly move them and besides that, they required such extensive maintenance that it was quite natural that the place where people tried to use the machine was the same laboratory where the machine had been developed. Secondly, the programmer’s somewhat invisible work was without any glamour: You could show the machine to visitors and that was several orders of magnitude more spectacular than some sheets of coding. But most important of all, the programmer himself had a very modest view of his own work: his work derived all its significance from the existence of that wonderful machine. Because the machine was unique, he knew his programs had only local significance. And since the machine would live for a short time... he knew that little or none of his code held lasting value.   The

We went on that programme and we’d done our homework, thinking we were going to get into quite a tough theological argument, but it turned out to be virtually a slinging match. We were very surprised by that. I don’t get angry very often but I got incandescent with rage at their attitude and the smugness of it. And it was really the way they played to the audience that got me. We weren’t defeated in argument at all. John was brilliant. What they were trying to do was to sort of smirk at the audience and belittle what we’d done and that seemed so out of touch and so stupid and so mistaken. I mean, how do they think the film was made? That we go in there one night, write the script and the film’s made the next morning? They don’t realise we’d been working on it for two years, we’d studied, that we had an opinion and we had an attitude, but they wouldn’t let us have that. So it was their condescension that really got me irritated.’ Gilliam remembers having never seen Palin quite so pissed off before.

-“The greatest discovery of this generation is the knowledge that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind” William James -“A man is the sum total of his thinking. You can think your way into, or out of any emotional state, simply by the thoughts you have in your mind. -“Human beings have the power within them to programme their mind to achieve the desires of their hearts. “Whatever the mind can conceive if you believe you can achieve.” “According to your faith be it unto you.” -Mat 9:29 -“One of the most comforting thought is: God is always with you; the power of God is within you, and God has given you the power to call on the universe to attract the desires of your heart.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims POWER OF WORDS -“According to the bible, words were the tool that God used to create the universe. “Let there be.. and it was so.” -“Words have the power to shape our minds, influence our thoughts and move us to action. Knowing the effect words can have in programming our minds and influencing our behavior, we should be sensitive to how words are used when communicating. The Good news is, it is never too late to use words to make changes to our lives.” -“Be mindful of what you say……. for words spoken cannot be taken back. Think carefully before you speak, saying only what you mean. The closest ears to your mouth are yours. Learn to speak positive words both to yourself and to others, since you will be the first to feel the effects.” -“Let your manner of speech be positive if you wish to develop a peaceful state of mind. Start each day by affirming tranquil positive and optimistic words so your days will be pleasant and successful.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims PRACTICE -“Practice does not make excellence, but the right practice makes great improvements. If you Practice an activity the wrong way, all it serves to do is to make you better at doing it the wrong way.” -“Practice does not make perfect, it only makes you better at what you practice. There is no such level as perfection, for in the game of life change is inevitable.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims RELATIONSHIPS -“Take time to know him/her it’s not an overnight thing”… with time the real person will eventually reveal his/her true character. At the beginning of all relationships people often exhibit their best behavior…. they want to sell themselves to you. They will often tell you what they know you want to hear. You can know a person better when you see them at their worst.” - Sekou Obadias – Author of “SOGANUTU” – A book of life’s Maxims

In any case, why adopt methodological naturalism? You might say that we have no choice in this matter, if we wish to do science, for invoking God as a cause of a natural phenomenon is a science-stopper and so would impede science. This fear strikes me as quite unjustified. The proponent of a theistic hypothesis, like the proponent of any scientific hypothesis, will seek to state conditions which would serve to falsify his hypothesis, and then he will propose experiments to test his hypothesis by trying to replicate such conditions. Thus, far from being a science stopper, a theistic hypothesis can serve to generate an ongoing research programme. There’s no reason at all to think that the attitude of the proponent of a theistic hypothesis must be, 'We can't explain this and we never will.' Quite the contrary, he may hold his hypothesis very tentatively and be prepared to give it up if the experimental evidence should falsify his hypothesis.

I really believed that computers were deterministic, that you could understand what they were supposed to do, and that there was no excuse for computers not working, for things not functioning properly. In retrospect, I was surprisingly good at keeping the system running, putting in new code and having it not break the system. That was the first instance of something I got an undeserved reputation for. I know that my boss, and probably some other of my colleagues, have said I was a great debugger. And that's partly true. But there's a fake in there. Really what I was was a very careful programmer with the arrogance to believe that very few computer programs are inherently difficult. I would take some piece of code that didn't look like it was working and I would try to read it. And if I could understand, then I could usually see what was wrong or poke around with it and fix it. But sometimes I would get a piece of code—often one that other people couldn't make work—and I would say, “This is way too complicated.” So I would think through what it was supposed to do, throw it away, and write it again from scratch. Some of the folks I worked with—like Will Crowther—who are terrific programmers, couldn't tolerate that. They would believe that by doing that, I would probably have fixed the 2 bugs that were there and introduced 27 new bugs. But the fact is, I was good at that. So I would rewrite stuff completely and it would be organized differently than the original programmer had organized it because I had thought about the problem differently. Typically, it was simpler than it used to be, or at least simpler to my eyes. And it would work. So I got this reputation—I fixed these mysterious bugs that nobody else could fix. Fortunately, they never asked me what the bug was. Because the truth of the matter is if they'd have asked, “How did you fix the bug?” my answer would have been, “I couldn't understand the code well enough to figure out what it was doing, so I rewrote it.” I did that a lot on the PDP-1 time-sharing system. There were chunks of the code that I would read and would say, “This doesn't do what I think this part of the program is supposed to be doing,” or “It's weird.” So I'd rewrite it. The only thing that kept me working there, with that attitude, was that I had a good track record. That's one of the things, that if you're not good at it, you make chaos. But if you are good at it, the world thinks that you can do things that you can't, really.

الأفكار السلبية تعيق تقدمنا، علينا أن نقاومها ببسالة والتخلص من جذور المشكلة هو الشيء الذي يقتلعنا من وضع الألم من الضعف من الإهانة من سوء الحال..علينا أن نصعق معتقداتنا الذاتية الواهمة التي لا تلزم الا كل واحد منا لنجعلها نقطة انطلاقة لرحلة حب كونية ولنرتفع الى سماء الأسوياء المستقرين نفسيا القادرين على الأخذ بزمام الأمور ونستنشق هناك الأوكسيجين النقي الشافي، ونمشي في طرق كنا نعتقد أنها لم تخلق لمثلنا.. لا يجب أن نهدر عمر الأفراد والشعوب ونحن عالقين في أوحال الخوف وأشواك الماضي، هذا هو التشخيص، وانها حياة نستحقها لا كره فيها لا خوف فيها ولا ندم.

Based on my years of experience in the software factory, I’ve concluded that the real difference between mediocre programmers and great programmers is this: attitude. Good programming lies in taking a professional approach, and wanting to write the best software you can, within the real-world constraints and pressures of the software factory.

Although Tata was a very liberal father in some ways, he could also be stubbornly conservative. These attitudes were obvious when I was in Mysore. I wanted to join the extracurricular student paramilitary organisation, the National Cadet Corps (NCC), which had just been introduced. All my college friends had volunteered to participate. However, Tata flatly refused me permission with the diktat: ‘No! I don’t like the idea of girls wearing pants.’ I was very envious of my friends wearing pants in the NCC. After completing my bachelor’s degree in psychology, Tata encouraged me to pursue my passion by enrolling in the master’s degree programme at the Manasa Gangothri campus of the University of Mysore. We were only two girls among eight students in that class. The famous Professor Kuppuswamy was my teacher. We had to conduct practical experiments on human subjects, forming smaller groups. Because we were only two girls, these groups were necessarily mixed. A couple of months later, a professor of philosophy who was a friend of my uncle, K.R. Karanth, wrote to Tata that I was overly friendly with the boys in my class. Tata, with his usual penchant for sending cryptic telegrams, sent one that just said, ‘Come home immediately.’ I took the overnight bus from Mysore and reached Balavana in the morning. Tata confronted me with the offending letter, saying, ‘A professor has complained that you are talking to the boys in your class!’ I was furious. I retorted, saying, ‘We are two girls. We must conduct experiments in teams that include boys. I can’t participate in experiments without talking to the boys. Either you let me go back and study or stop my education. You cannot tell me that I can go back and study psychology without talking to boys in my class.’ My strong ultimatum made him realise how foolish he had been. He sheepishly said, ‘Go back, go back. Do whatever you want to do.’ There was a very strong, caring, trusting relationship between us. I had fought back with facts, and Tata respected that. He never brought up the subject of boys again. In contrast, Amma had total faith in me. I could not do anything wrong. ‘Let Malu do what she wants,’ was her clear opinion. Tata’s judgement of people was much poorer than Amma’s. Even if a stranger wrote something nonsensical to him, he had this tendency to believe the worst first and ask questions later.