Melvin Conway on system design
Melvin Conway's own site, Wikipedia
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Phil Karlton's "two hard things"
David Karlton on skeptics.stackexchange.com
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things
Kent Beck on refactoring
For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change.
Bruce Schneier on AES
To us, AES is the shining example of how to standardize security systems. AES is not a design by committee, but rather a design by competition.
Tony Hoare on premature optimization
Popularized by Donald Knuth's 1974 book Structured Programming with go to Statements. Knuth credits Tony Hoare, whom then credits Edsger Dijkstra
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Check out my thoughts on this one.
John Carmack on functions
Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.
Kent Beck on strategies on writing new code
Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
Jack W. Reeves on software design
Designing software is an exercise in managing complexity.
Anders Hejlsberg on working from home
Interview with The Aarthi and Sriram Show
I treated work as the place where I wouldn't work and then I go home and work.
Tony Hoare on null pointers
Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake, Null: The Billion dollar mistake
I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965.
Bjarne Stroustrup
https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html
It's easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars, chapter III: The Tool
Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
This is the translation found in Airman's Odyssey. I've found different wordings of this phrase online.
Ada Lovelace on Babbage’s machine
As quoted by Charles Petzold in his book Code
We may say that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.
Donald Knuth
Interview in the magazine Computer Language, volume 2, number 5, page 26, which I know of thanks to the amazing Computer Ads From The Past's article
The best way to program, I believe now, is really to concentrate on explaining to a person what the computer is supposed to do rather than explaining to a machine what it's supposed to do.
Peter Todd
Mail sent to the bitcoin-dev list on Tue, Jan 18, 2022 (original, dead link)
Bitcoin is an almost $1 trillion dollar system. We have to very carefully weigh the benefits of making core consensus changes to that system against the risks. Both for each proposal in isolation, as well as the precedent making that change sets.
At its peak, the bitcoin market cap actually exceeded 1 trillion, getting very close to 1.3. For comparison, Microsoft reached a trillion dollar market cap in 2019, when it was 44 years old and had over 150k employees. Bitcoin was 13 years old when this email was sent, is and always was open source and free, the reference implementation has had less than 100 significant contributors, and we still don't even know who Satoshi Nakamoto is.
Andy Tannenbaum on Unix' legal disclaimer
In his talk at the Winter 1984 USENIX/UniForum meeting
There was always a foil which described Bell System Unix support policy:
| no advertising
| no support
| no bug fixes
| payment in advanceThis slide was always greeted by wild applause and laughter.