Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

Adding functionality is not just a matter of adding code.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

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

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.

I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.

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

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

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

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

No one-liner can ever be optimal.

When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

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.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.

Trivia rarely affect efficiency. Are all the machinations worth it, when their primary effect is to make the code less readable?

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

Developers, developers, developers...