Tim Bray Quotes

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I'm now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.

"Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

If 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me.

One of the advantages of having to live with JUnit for 8 years is now we can look back and see which decisions we made worked nicely and which we would have done differently.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

In software engineering, we have the term 'technical debt.' When you don't do a job correctly, unaddressed problems become harder and harder to solve.

Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

Early in my career, I was involved with engineer-led projects, where designers came in late in the game and were expected to put lipstick on an existing code base. This almost never works.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.

Software is like gardening - one day I'll go behind the shed and clean up. But if nobody ever goes there, does it matter a lot?

I have the ability to get code done, but I'm impatient, and it's scrappy as a result. Maybe that helped me with 'Minecraft,' as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I'd like to actually become a good programmer.

Some of these isolated applications that sit on one machine are a million lines of code. How do you deal with that? Most people have no way to wrap their head around it.

The way that NetBeans is architected, it's not so much a tool as a tool environment.

Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?