Brian Kernighan Quotes

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience, we still feel that way.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

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

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up.

A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.

The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

I'm a great coder. But I am not pushing that so much anymore because there are thousands of great coders.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

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.

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

Code writers, they are my idols.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.