Rasmus Lerdorf Quotes

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.

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.

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

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

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

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

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

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

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.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

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.

My dad grew up as a computer programmer, so he always had random computer software, and I started opening up editing software at age 12 and figuring out how to build websites.

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.

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.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

It's hard to tune heavily tuned code.

C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.