Brian Kernighan Quotes

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

No one wants one language. There are applications when it's appropriate to write something in C rather than in Java. If you want to write something where performance is much more important than extensibility, then you might want to choose C rather than Java.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

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%.

Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.

Good code is its own best documentation.

The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.

Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances.