Lars Wirzenius: Quote, 2003
Contents
- December 13: Leeloo has a multipass now
- November 18: Yannis's Law
- November 17: Commenting code
- November 12: Dijkstra
- October 28: Epigram 31
- October 21: Language worth learning
Saturday, December 13, 2003
Quote: Leeloo has a multipass now
Yoe as Leeloo, Ropecon 2001.
Yoe's blog entry for December 1, 2003, is the best log entry I've seen so far, though admittedly it might not work in isolation and may require some background knowledge. In it she announces that she has just successfully defended her doctorate thesis and, except for bureaucratic stuff, is a PhD: Crash bang boom - big bada boom! Leeloo has a multipass now.
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Quote: Yannis's Law
Programmer productivity doubles every 6 years.
He even has the numbers to produce it. Even if he provocative, he might be onto something.
Monday, November 17, 2003
Quote: Commenting code
I was reading an old thread on commenting code in comp.programming. The funniest example was this:
i++; /* TODO: make this pre-increment - more efficient */
That comment is wrong in so many ways it is impossible not to laugh at it. The funniest stupid comment I have experienced, however, is this:
/* The following line has been commented out */
Presumably someone, somewhere collects such comments on a webpage.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Quote: Dijkstra
Edsger W. Dijkstra is always a good source of quotations. Today, I found How do we tell truths that might hurt?, which he seems to have written in 1975. My favorite bullet point:
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
I run into this all the time in my job. Whenever we do something complicated on the embedded side, things break. Whenever the box manufacturer has done something complicated, things break.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Quote: Epigram 31
Another good quote from Alan Perlis' Epigrams in programming: 31. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
Quote: Language worth learning
"Any language that does not change the way you think about programming is not worth learning." Bruce Lewis, comp.lang.scheme.
Update: It seems that Lewis was almost quoting Alan Perlis: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." (See epigrams.) Thanks to Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho and Chris Beggy for the link.