“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

— Martin Fowler

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." by Martin Fowler?

Martin Fowler 18

British programmer 1963

Related quotes

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“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.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Why Python? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

“You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html#education; Lecture at Sciences Po in Paris (19 October 2011)]
2010s

“(To the extent that anyone but a Prolog programmer can understand \X totally. (And to the extent that a Prolog programmer can understand 'cut'.)”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Usenet postings, 1997

“Frameworks are white boxes to those that make use of them. Application developers must be able to quickly understand the structure of a framework, and how to write code that will fit into the framework. Frameworks are reusable designs as well as reusable code.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: a responsibility-driven approach (1989), p. 13

“A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "Functional programming in C++" http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“Computers are not very smart. They don't understand human language, so we have to tell them what to do in a language that both humans and computers can understand.”

Yukihiro Matsumoto (1965) Japanese computer scientist

Yukihiro Matsumoto " I'm a Mormon, Ruby Author and a World-changer https://youtube.com/watch?v=bkh0gPf4Noc" by ComeUntoChrist.org on 2013-08-12.

“Today, computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any other code or language.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 80

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Martin Fowler 18

Related quotes

Related topics