Steve McConnell Quotes

Good code is its own best documentation. As you're about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn't needed?" Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

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

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

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.

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

Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything, so consider picking the most readable one.

Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.

I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

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.

My dad got me an iMac, and I spent my whole childhood with my eyes glued to it. I was technically savvy and knew how to make it work for me.

I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

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

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

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

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

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

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

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.