Code Management Quotes

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

Tom [Cargil]s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would - Jim [Waldo] pointed out - make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

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.

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don't do that, and it's a problem.

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