This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on April 21, 2008 6:15 AM.
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Great quotes! My faves were #'s 4, 5, 20, 89, and 100.
"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."
When is that damn meteor gonna finally make COBOL extinct once and for all?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
If Gates could only get Vista that small...
You can probably tell who is a programmer by which are their favorites.
#66, of course, is from the designer of C++, which elevates the quip from funny to priceless.
I'm no programmer, just a user (see #37), but by the time I got through the first four of the C/C++ quotes, it was a good thing I'd been to the bathroom just before I stated reading them. I also like 8, 22 & 44
They left out my favorite: "If architects designed buildings the way programmers design programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."
The Gates "640K ought to be enough for anybody" quote is an urban legend.
640K would be enough for my bank account :-)
With regard to the architects quote...many corporate IT departments would have blown up the Starship Enterprise within the 5-year mission timeframe if they had been in control of engineering.
My own personal quote is a variation of this one:
"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
(Rich Cook)
(me, as a programmer:)
As a programmer, I think users are idiots. They never read any instructions on or off line, have no learning capability whatsoever, do no tutorials, do the stupidest things, have no patience, expect the most complicated operations to be magically intuitive, and won't even try amazing features.
However.
I'm also a user. And I'm the same idiot.