Quotes about code
page 4

Albert Einstein photo
Alan M. Dershowitz photo

“Before a just society can be established the property system and the penal code of such a social order must be radically transformed.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Individualism and Socialism (1933)

Camille Paglia photo
Simone Weil photo
Mike Huckabee photo
Ward Cunningham photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Alan Turing photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo

“When code and comments disagree, both are probably wrong.”

More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder, Column 6: Bumper-Sticker Computer Science. http://www.softwarequotes.com/ShowQuotes.asp?ID=660&Name=Schryer%20,_Norm&Type=Q

Robert Silverberg photo
Kristi Noem photo

“We need to simplify our tax code. We need to make sure that it’s not too cumbersome for people to be able to comply with. And that they don’t end up spending more money trying to file their taxes than they do actually paying in.”

Kristi Noem (1971) South Dakota politician

Woster, Kevin. Noem ad: poignant or political? http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/opinion/columnists/local/article_af98dacc-5a2f-11df-96dc-001cc4c002e0.html Rapid City Journal. May 9, 2010.

Mark Hertling photo

“No matter who is the President, that person never has the authority to 'order' members of the Armed Forces to violate the Uniformed Code of Military Justice, their ethos, their oath or the international law of land combat.”

Mark Hertling (1953) United States Army general

As quoted in "A soldier's view on Trump" http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/04/opinions/donald-trump-military-hertling/index.html CNN, 4 March 2016

Wisława Szymborska photo

“Secret codes resound.
Doubts and intentions come to light.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Archeology"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)

Ian Hislop photo
Theodore Kaczynski photo

“An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge."”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

Aleksander (2001) in: New scientist. Vol. 169. p.56 cited in: Jacques Vallée (2003) The Heart of the Internet. p.8

Murray Bookchin photo
Linus Torvalds photo

“I don't ask for money. I don't ask for sexual favors. I don't ask for access to the hardware you design and sell. I just ask for the thing I gave you: source code that I can use myself.”

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

Message to Linux kernel mailing list, 2007-06-14, Torvalds, Linus, 2010-02-01 http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/msg/29b45885cc7b11b3,
2000s, 2007

Manuel Castells photo
Antonin Scalia photo
Antonin Scalia photo

“As I understand the various opinions today: One Justice holds that two-parent notification is unconstitutional (at least in present circumstances) without judicial bypass, but constitutional with bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is constitutional with or without bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is unconstitutional with or without bypass, though the four apply two different standards […]; six Justices hold that one-parent notification with bypass is constitutional, though for two different sets of reasons […]; and three Justices would hold that one-parent notification with bypass is unconstitutional […]. One will search in vain the document we are supposed to be construing for text that provides the basis for the argument over these distinctions and will find in our society’s tradition regarding abortion no hint that the distinctions are constitutionally relevant, much less any indication how a constitutional argument about them ought to be resolved. The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled individual views make it increasingly evident, Term after Term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer’s – and hence not in the judges – workbox. I continue to dissent from this enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On whether a state law may require notification of both parents before a minor can obtain an abortion; Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990, concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part), 497 U.S. 417 http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/497/417.html, No. 88-605 ; decided June 25, 1990
1990s

Larry Wall photo

“Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.”

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

In the perl man page.
Documentation

Calvin Coolidge photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Linus Torvalds photo
Rob Pike photo
David Clark photo

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.”

David Clark (1944) American computer scientist

A Cloudy Crystal Ball -- Visions of the Future, PDF, 1992-07-16, 2016-05-13 https://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/People/DDC/future_ietf_92.pdf, (Presentation given at the 24th Internet Engineering Task Force)
frequently cited as the motto of the Internet engineering community

Ramnath Goenka photo

“I have committed every crime in the Indian Penal Code, except murder.”

Ramnath Goenka (1904–1991) Indian politician

In Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

Poul Anderson photo

“Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!”

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 175

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Jacques Derrida photo

“Although Saussure recognized the necessity of putting the phonic substance between brackets ("What is essential in language, we shall see, is foreign to the phonic character of the linguistic sign" [p. 21]. "In its essence it [the linguistic signifier] is not at all phonic" [p. 164]), Saussure, for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, everything that links the sign to phone. He also speaks of the "natural link" between thought and voice, meaning and sound (p. 46). He even speaks of "thought-sound" (p. 156). I have attempted elsewhere to show what is traditional in such a gesture, and to what necessities it submits. In any event, it winds up contradicting the most interesting critical motive of the Course, making of linguistics the regulatory model, the "pattern" for a general semiology of which it was to be, by all rights and theoretically, only a part. The theme of the arbitrary, thus, is turned away from its most fruitful paths (formalization) toward a hierarchizing teleology:… One finds exactly the same gesture and the same concepts in Hegel. The contradiction between these two moments of the Course is also marked by Saussure's recognizing elsewhere that "it is not spoken language that is natural to man, but the faculty of constituting a language, that is, a system of distinct signs …," that is, the possibility of the code and of articulation, independent of any substance, for example, phonic substance.”

Source: Positions, 1982, p. 21

Rasmus Lerdorf photo

“I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.”

Rasmus Lerdorf (1968) Danish programmer and creator of PHP

Itconversations.com http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail58.html

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Ward Cunningham photo
Fernando J. Corbató photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Doug McIlroy photo
Aron Ra photo

“I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.”

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) English author and academic

Source: Eating People is Wrong (1959), Ch. 5

Fred Brooks photo
Dennis Miller photo

“The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

Ranting Again

Ed Yourdon photo

“A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don't have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed.”

Ed Yourdon (1944–2016) American software engineer and pioneer in the software engineering methodology

Yourdon (1990) cited in: Andreas Paepcke (1991) Object-oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications. p. 166.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Fernando J. Corbató photo

“Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

"PL/I as a Tool for System Programming", Datamation, 15 (5), 6 May 1969, pp. 68–76. This has been paraphrased variously by others as Corbató's Law:
Productivity and reliability depend on the length of a program’s text, independent of language level used.
Albert Endres, H. Dieter Rombach, A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering: Empirical Observations, Laws and Theories (2003), ISBN 0321154207, p. 72
The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.
[citation needed]

Eric S. Raymond photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo

“My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1988) " On the cruelty of really teaching computing science http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html (EWD1036).
1980s

Douglas Coupland photo
James K. Morrow photo

“Let us examine the language here. Evidently God is addressing this code to a patriarchy that will in turn disseminate it among the less powerful, namely wives and servants. And how long before these servants are downgraded further still…into slaves, even? Ten whole commandments, and not one word against slavery, not to mention bigotry, misogyny, or war.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

"Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant" p. 130 (originally published in What Might Have Been? Volume 1: Alternate Empires, edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg)
Short fiction, Bible Stories for Adults (1996)

Bernard Harcourt photo
Frederick Lewis Allen photo

“It is easier to tear down a code than to put a new one in its place.”

Frederick Lewis Allen (1890–1954) American historian and editor of Harper's Magazine

Only Yesterday http://books.google.com/books?id=cdmXVzZ5xOsC&q=%22It+is+easier+to+tear+down+a+code+than+to+put+a+new+one+in+its+place%22&pg=PA102#v=onepage, ch. 5, (1931)

John F. Kerry photo

“The messages of the prophets are essentially indictments of Israel for breach of covenant. They preserved some memory of the old traditions, but were not so naive as to think that the literal demands of the old law would be adequate in their own times. There is no condemnation of the stratification of society as such, rather a condemnation of the injustice and extortion which was done by the powerful. To take a specific example, the old law knew as security for a loan only the pledge (Exod. 22:26). In a simple economy, loans were evidently of an amount which would usually be adequately secured by giving to the creditor some property to hold until the loan was repaid. In case of default, the debtor's property simply reverted to the creditor. No other form of security is presupposed in the Covenant Code, and it is specifically forbidden that an Israelite be a "creditor" to one of his fellows. Already in the reign of Saul the situation had changed, Those who gathered about David as outlaws included those who had "creditors" (I Sam. 22:2), and who therefore had to flee. Under the old pledge system of security there would be no possible occasion for flight from the community in case of default. A totally different legal doctrine had come into practice whereby the person of the debtor was security for a loan. Upon default the creditor could seize him (or his family) as a slave, possibly without any legal action at all. The only alternative to slavery would have been flight. This doctrine is identical to that of Babylonian law, and no doubt of the Canaanites as well. It is in the law of the monarchy that Canaanite influence is doubtless to be posited, but it is a legal tradition in total contradiction to the customs and morality of early Israel. Amos protested violently against the way the legal doctrine was practiced, as did most of the prophets (Am. 2:6; Hos. 12:8-9; Mic. 2:1-2). The later lawcodes illustrate beautifully the way in which the early traditions, and the needs of business were brought into harmony. The older pledge system was simply inadequate for a commercial economy; and if the person of the debtor was to be protected, so also must the rights of the creditor to some security for his loan to be guaranteed. Therefore, Deuteronomy and the Holiness Code (Lv. 17-26) accept the doctrine of bodily liability, but place restrictions upon the powers of the creditor over the defaulting debtor. In the Holiness Code he is not to be treated as a slave, nor given the legal status of a slave, but rather to be as a hired laborer.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Law and Convenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (1954)

Benjamin N. Cardozo photo
Larry Wall photo

“It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.”

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

[199801141725.JAA07555@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Jefferson Davis photo
Norbert Wiener photo

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 157.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Jennifer Beals photo

“[On boxing] [For] The Chicago Code, I did some boxing. It makes you stand differently when you know you can punch someone out.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview in Windy City Pride (4 February 2011) http://www.citysbest.com/chicago/news/2011/02/04/jennifer-beals-talks-chicago-code-windy-city-pride.

Dinesh D'Souza photo

“Consistent with Martin Luther King's vision, the government should stop color-coding its citizens.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

"As I See It", in Forbes Vol. 158, no. 13 (2 December 1996), p. 48.

Hillary Clinton photo
Richard Dawkins photo
H.L. Mencken photo
Kevin James photo
Philip K. Dick photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo
Nikolai Krylenko photo

“In the absence of a criminal code, a court might give a reprimand for a punch in the nose in Ryazan, while the sentence in Tula might be shooting.”

Nikolai Krylenko (1885–1938) Russian revolutionary, politician and chess organiser

Krylenko on the importance of having a universal criminal code, quoted in Yuri Feofanov & ‎Donald D. Barry, Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era

Russell Brand photo
Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo
William H. McNeill photo
Benjamin Harrison photo

“The colored people did not intrude themselves upon us. They were brought here in chains and held in the communities where they are now chiefly found by a cruel slave code. Happily for both races, they are now free. They have from a standpoint of ignorance and poverty—which was our shame, not theirs—made remarkable advances in education and in the acquisition of property. They have as a people shown themselves to be friendly and faithful toward the white race under temptations of tremendous strength. They have their representatives in the national cemeteries, where a grateful Government has gathered the ashes of those who died in its defense. They have furnished to our Regular Army regiments that have won high praise from their commanding officers for courage and soldierly qualities and for fidelity to the enlistment oath. In civil life they are now the toilers of their communities, making their full contribution to the widening streams of prosperity which these communities are receiving. Their sudden withdrawal would stop production and bring disorder into the household as well as the shop. Generally they do not desire to quit their homes, and their employers resent the interference of the emigration agents who seek to stimulate such a desire.”

Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901) American politician, 23rd President of the United States (in office from 1889 to 1893)

First State of the Union Address (1889)

Pat Conroy photo
Camille Paglia photo
Larry Wall photo

“It's, uh, pseudo code. Yeah, that's the ticket…[…]And 'unicode' is pseudo code for $encoding.”

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

[199808071717.KAA12628@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Linus Torvalds photo

“Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there's only one of me.”

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
YouTube
Google
2007.
2000s, 2007

Hillary Clinton photo

“Every child deserves a good teacher in a good school, regardless of the zip code that they live in.”

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

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

John D. Carmack photo

“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

Richard Cobden photo

“When the sample size is small or the study is of one organization, descriptive use of the thematic coding is desirable.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Transforming qualitative information (1998), p. 129.

Roger Manganelli photo
Linus Torvalds photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo

“Whatever the man of realization is the moral code for us to follow. The qualities of his actions are the standards by which the world determines its sense of justice, the concept of Dharma.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

in The Penguin Swami Chinmyananda Reader http://books.google.co.in/books?id=iDiRLzPFOPIC&pg=PA213, p. 213

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo