Fred Brooks Quotes

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

I felt there was a need for us to build a new programming language. I also had come to see that Microsoft functions best when it controls its own destiny.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

I don't program, so I don't belong in Silicon Valley. If I did belong in Silicon Valley, I'd be there creating a revolutionary compression algorithm for billions of dollars.

We don't know how to actually code, but I wish that I did. It's so much harder than anyone could possibly imagine - it's like learning German.

I don't know how to code. I should know how to code.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

Whether you draw diagrams that generate code or you type at a browser, you are coding.

Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There's a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.