Brian Kernighan Quotes

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

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.

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.

Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

If there is a bug in your code than you have to drop everything you're doing and go fix it.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent."

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

All the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.