Favourite quotes

2012-06-25

A selection of my favourite quotes I've come across recently

L1 cache - 3s grabbing a piece of paper

L2 cache - 14s picking a book from a shelf

System RAM - 4m walk down the hall

Hard drive seek - Like leaving the building to roam the earth for one year and three months

Gustavo Duarte (via Brandon Rhodes at pycon us - Python Linkers and Virtual Memory)

The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.

Pamela Zave (via Jon Bentley's - Programming Pearls)

I think it's better to give users the rope they want than to try and prevent them from hanging themselves, since otherwise they'll just use the power cords as ropes and electrocute themselves.

Guido van Rossum - resolving a TZ-aware local time request

I think that if I was running a company like Microsoft I would ask everyone to read Code Complete, but if I were running a start up, I would ask no-one to read Code Complete. Code Complete is all about being exceptionally conservative with your programming practise. If you have a small company full of brilliant programmers you don't really want to tie their hands, you want to let them go as far as they can with the language they've got. If you have tens of thousands of programmers, you would like everyone to not do anything interesting at all, to use the most basic of design patterns, to never optimize their code because it get's harder for the person whose behind them or they might make a mistake during optimisation.

Raymond Hettinger (via Radio Free Python)

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison (via Linus Torvalds Aalto talk)

Yes, I really like Python, I like it for a very specific reason, I like Python because of all the languages I have ever used it is the one that maximises ease of long term maintainability. That is the ease with which you can read your code six months later, and the longer I program the more convinced I am that that is the most important metric of a language.. bar none.

Eric 'ESR' Raymond presenting to the Philadelphia Area Java Users' Group

The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.

Gordon Bell (via Jon Bentley's - Programming Pearls)

Simons blog / 2012 / 6 / 25