02Oct Quotes about Programming

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It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)
There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)
Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn’t work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. (Karl Lehenbauer)
Please don’t fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline! (Edsger Dijkstra)
Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is. (Larry Wall)
XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language. (Charles Simonyi)
Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach. (Stephen C Johnson)

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code.(Paul Graham)

[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it! (Mark Andreessen)