Programming Wisdom

"The best way to get the right answer [..] is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” -  Cunningham’s Law

"The best error message is the one that never shows up." - Thomas Fuchs

“Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.” - John Carmack

"Later equals never." - Le Blanc's law

"When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code." - Richard Pattis

"The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it's going to run. And if it doesn't, it'll be easy to make it fast." - Joshua Bloch

"What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months." - Fred Brooks

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code." - Christopher Thompson

"An evolving system increases its complexity unless work is done to reduce it." - Meir Lehman

"The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build." - Bjarne Stroustrup

“Programming is breaking of one big impossible task into several very small possible tasks.” - Jazzwant

"If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." - E. W. Dijkstra

“Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.” - Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering

"Things that are impossible just take longer." - Ian Hickson

Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.” - Chris Pine

“I’ve learned over the past few years that comments should be considered smells.” - Ron Lisle

"Eagleson's Law: Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else." - Alan Eagleson