Quotes about code

A collection of quotes on the topic of code, use, people, doing.

Quotes about code

Linus Torvalds photo

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to linux-kernel mailing list, 2000-08-25, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132,
2000s, 2000-04

Rick Riordan photo
Tamora Pierce photo
Hammurabi photo
Tamora Pierce photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“You may never know what type of person someone is unless they are given opportunities to violate moral or ethical codes.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo
Andrea Dworkin photo
George Orwell photo
George Orwell photo

“Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground.”

He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10

William Blum photo

“Title 18 of the US Code declares it to be a crime to launch a "military or naval expedition or enterprise" from the United States against a country with which the United States is not (officially) at war.”

William Blum (1933–2018) American author and historian

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Chapter 30. Cuba 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution

Terry Pratchett photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Robert C. Martin photo

“Truth can only be found in one place: the code.”

Robert C. Martin (1952) American software consultant

Source: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Frédéric Bastiat photo

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

Lorsque la Spoliation est devenue le moyen d’existence d’une agglomération d’hommes unis entre eux par le lien social, ils se font bientôt une loi qui la sanctionne, une morale qui la glorifie.
Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848), ch. 1 Physiology of plunder ("Sophismes économiques", 2ème série (1848), chap. 1 "Physiologie de la spoliation").
Economic Sophisms (1845–1848)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
C.G. Jung photo
Napoleon I of France photo

“Waterloo will wipe out the memory of my forty victories; but that which nothing can wipe out is my Civil Code. That will live forever.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

As quoted in The Story of World Progress (1922) by Willis Mason West, p. 437
Attributed

Abraham Lincoln photo

“Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular Sovereignty"; but never a man among you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live."”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Cooper Union speech (1860)
Context: Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular Sovereignty"; but never a man among you is in favor of federal prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves, and your charge or destructiveness against us, are based on the most clear and stable foundations.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Frédéric Bastiat photo
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach photo

“The moral code which was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for our children.”

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) Austrian writer

Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 85.

Tom Wills photo
Peter Ustinov photo
Frank Zappa photo
John D. Carmack photo
Albert Camus photo
Douglass C. North photo
Kent Beck photo

“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

Nayef Al-Rodhan photo
Bjarne Stroustrup photo

“"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.”

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ: What is "legacy code"?, 2007-11-15 http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#legacy,

Douglass C. North photo

“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interactions. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, tradition, and code of conduct) and formal rules”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

constitutions, laws, property rights
Source: Institutions (1990), p. 97; As cited in: Oliver E. Williamson (1996) The Mechanisms of Governance. p. 4

Reinhold Niebuhr photo

“The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience.”

Source: Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), pp. 8-9
Context: The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with the all the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolizes one of the tragedies of the human spirit: its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.

John Maynard Keynes photo

“When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.”

as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Martin Fowler photo

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

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

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

Bjarne Stroustrup photo

“Everyone writes code as they’re used to, and that’s ugly.”

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++

Conference Madrid 2019

Barack Obama photo
Choudhry Rahmat Ali photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Harper Lee photo
Karen Joy Fowler photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
John Woods photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Steven Pressfield photo

“Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Libba Bray photo

“Destiny had a 518 area code.. who knew." - Ehlena”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Avenged

Jeffrey Zeldman photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Jim Butcher photo
Jim Butcher photo
Rachel Cohn photo

“I've given him more mixed signals than a dyslexic Morse code operator.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Mark Z. Danielewski photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Richelle Mead photo
Jim Butcher photo
Neal Stephenson photo

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Source: The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Ram Dass photo
Amy Hempel photo
Nick Hornby photo
Eoin Colfer photo

“This might hurt a little is universal code for this will definitely hurt a lot”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Last Guardian

Brandon Sanderson photo
Rick Riordan photo
Bill Gates photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Kent Hovind photo

“I know that I disagree with many other UML experts, but there is no magic about UML. If you can generate code from a model, then it is programming language. And UML is not a well-designed programming language.
The most important reason is that it lacks a well-defined point of view, partly by intent and partly because of the tyranny of the OMG standardization process that tries to provide everything to everybody. It doesn't have a well-defined underlying set of assumptions about memory, storage, concurrency, or almost anything else. How can you program in such a language?
The fact is that UML and other modelling language are not meant to be executable. The point of models is that they are imprecise and ambiguous. This drove many theoreticians crazy so they tried to make UML "precise", but models are imprecise for a reason: we leave out things that have a small effect so we can concentrate on the things that have big or global effects. That's how it works in physics models: you model the big effect (such as the gravitation from the sun) and then you treat the smaller effects as perturbation to the basic model (such as the effects of the planets on each other). If you tried to solve the entire set of equations directly in full detail, you couldn't do anything.”

James Rumbaugh (1947) Computer scientist, software engineer

James Rumbaugh in Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden eds. (2009) Masterminds of Programming. p. 339; cited in " Quote by James Rumbaugh http://www.ptidej.net/course/cse3009/winter13/resources/james" on ptidej.net. Last updated 2013-04-09 by guehene; Rumbaugh is responding to the question: "What do you think of using UML to generate implementation code?"

Wesley Clark photo
Richard Stallman photo
Daniel J. Bernstein photo
Charles P. Mattocks photo

“[Command] is one of the easiest things in the world if a man only is lavish of the immense power which is by the military code granted to a Regimental commander.”

Charles P. Mattocks (1840–1910) American soldier, lawyer and politician

Letter to his mother, in [Lorien Foote, The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy, https://books.google.com/books?id=d4kwDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA14, 5 October 2016, University of North Carolina Press, 978-1-4696-3056-4, 14–]

Grant Morrison photo

“Compared with the elegant inventions of the theorists, nature's code seemed a bit of a kludge.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 4, Inventing The Genetic Code, p. 66

George Carlin photo
Kenneth Arrow photo
Linus Torvalds photo
Serge Lang photo

“When program developers are not territorial about their code and encourage others to look for bugs and potential improvements, progress speeds up dramatically.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

M. B. Douthwaite (2002) Enabling Innovation: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Fostering Technological Change. p. 116

James Madison photo
Ryan C. Gordon photo

“The simple fact is that code quality tends to improve as you move between platforms… non-obvious bugs on Windows become VERY obvious in the Linux port and vice versa, and thus get fixed. So even the Windows gamers will win in all of this.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in, "Chat with Ryan Gordon" http://web.archive.org/web/20010502182109/http://www.descent-3.com/pad/news/16.html Chrono's Pad (2001-02-11)

Kent Hovind photo

“Similarities in the DNA code simply prove the same designer wrote the code. This is not evidence for evolution, it is actually proof for creation!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: Are you being brainwashed?: Propaganda in science textbooks (2007), p. 24

John S. Mosby photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“When they talk about legal status, that's code for second-class status.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

May 5, 2015
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

Larry Wall photo

“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?”

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

[199806181642.JAA10629@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Robert W. Service photo

“Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.”

Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Canadian poet

The Shooting of Dan McGrew http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/service_r_w/dan_mcgrew.html (1907), The Cremation of Sam McGee http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/2640/?letter=C&spage=26

Orson Scott Card photo
Charles Stross photo

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)