Tony Hoare Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

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.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

All software sucks.

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

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.

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.

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.

The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

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.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

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

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

Good visual layout shows the logical structure of a program.

Computer Science is the only discipline in which we view adding a new wing to a building as being maintenance.

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Good code is its own best documentation.

He doesn't have demons. He's not Batman, he doesn't struggle with inner turmoil. The nature of this character is that he puts himself last and helps the common good. So he could easily slip into a world of boredom, The blessing and curse of Captain America is that he doesn't have that fancy an ability. He doesn't live in another world, or turn green. He doesn't have bells and whistles, he doesn't shoot missiles. He punches and kicks.