Steve McConnell Quotes

Even if you aren't in doubt, consider the mental welfare of the person who has to maintain the code after you, and who will probably put parens in the wrong place.

Good code is its own best documentation.

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

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

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

Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.

If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.

Developer testing is an important step towards accountability. It gives developers a way to demonstrate the quality of the software they produce.

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

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.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

When you write a program, think of it primarily as a work of literature. You're trying to write something that human beings are going to read. Don't think of it primarily as something a computer is going to follow. The more effective you are at making your program readable, the more effective it's going to be: You'll understand it today, you'll understand it next week, and your successors who are going to maintain and modify it will understand it.

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

If there is a bug in your code than you have to drop everything you're doing and go fix it.

All the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.

I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.

Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

Procedure names should reflect what they do; function names should reflect what they return

We’re no longer in the days where every program is super well crafted. But at the heart of the programs that make it to the top, you’ll find that the key internal code was done by a few people who really knew what they were doing.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

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.