Code Complexity Quotes

The original version of C did not have structures. So to make tables of objects, process tables and file tables and this tables and that tables, it really was fairly painful.

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.

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

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 used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I'm now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.

If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

The first 9 pages of the Internal Revenue Code define income; the remaining 1,100 pages spin the web of exceptions and preferences.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.

Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.

Suprisingly, one of the most complex pieces of code is the code to determine where a note is in the staff. Finale stores notes as relative scale positions in the current key.

The important point is that the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. Sure, any given feature list can be implemented, given enough coding time. But in addition to coming out late, you will usually wind up with a codebase that is so fragile that new ideas that should be dead-simple wind up taking longer and longer to work into the tangled existing web. The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.

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

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.

I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?

There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors.

I define UNIX as 30 definitions of regular expressions living under one roof.

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

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.

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time

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

The Internal Revenue code has ballooned to a 5,600-page, 4 million-word complicated mess that is seven times as long as the Bible with none of the good news.