Jamie Zawinski Quotes

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

I'm not a political person. I'm a techie nerd, and I enjoy the techie part. I mean, all my life, I've loved great technology.

There aren't enough people out there that are becoming experts in technology as technology moves.

One of the things that Java is good at is giving you this homogeneous view of a reality that's usually very heterogeneous.

In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.

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

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

Successful software always gets changed.

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

Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

It would be possible to optimize some forms of goto, but I haven't bothered.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science.

On a purely technical side, I'm really very happy with how Linux gets used in a very wide set of different areas. It's important for development.

When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer.

Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.