Brian Kernighan Quotes

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software.

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.

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.

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word 'frustration'.

If you have an analytical bent like I do, going back to my days as a programmer, you like to ask questions.

I enjoy evangelizing Java. In my heart of hearts, I'm an engineer, and what makes me happy is building something that works and having someone use it. That's cool.

It's something special being able to build a program up.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

I'm a common sense person who tries to analyze and I have to look at all sides of the issue because you don't want software that only does something but doesn't fix the other errors.

Mathematicians have a certain type of mind, and climbers have a certain type of mind, because climbing poses these incredibly interesting problems for them.

Thinking rationally is often different from "positive thinking," in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

There's no such thing as a simple cache bug.

I'm stupid," Leo mumbled. "Pi would expand outward, because it's infinite." He reversed the order of the numbers, starting in the center and working toward the edge. When he aligned the last ring, something inside the sphere clicked. The door swung open. Leo beamed at his friends. "That, good people, is how we do things in Leo World. Come on in!" "I hate Leo World," Frank muttered. Hazel laughed.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.