Coding Challenges Quotes

I don't like programming. It's tedious.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.

...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major 'bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

I had to actually purchase a book to learn the API and write the client. It was pretty frustrating trying to learn the API and develop a product quickly.

Problem-solving, inventing, hacking and coding is more of an adrenaline rush of endorphins rather than a feeling.

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.

I had almost rewritten all of the display code for windows, and that was when I gave up.

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.

VK is famous for its competitions among third-party developers who build alternative versions of VK on its open API.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

I took Pascal, and I was terrible. And then, when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it.

One of the biggest problems that software developers face is that technology changes rapidly. It is very hard to stay current.

I'm definitely a night owl. I get going about the time my wife crashes and goes to bed. And in some sense, I've had to learn to be more of a cat napper in recent years because Perl development, Perl design and development, has become a worldwide phenomenon - not just mailing lists, but RSC channels, Twitter even. This all happens 24 hours a day. And people come up with questions at any time of the day or night.