Code Quotes

“The password to creativity is SILENCE.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Before You Doubt Yourself: Pep Talks and other Crucial Discussions

“Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“STOP APPLYING PATCHES.
RECODE YOURSELF NOW.

24 Dec National Mathematics Day”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Look out the window of the train: you’re moving, but you can’t remember leaving. Jagged brown crater dwellings run across the landscape, pipes with thick black smoke pouring out. Smoke overflowing, as the buildings themselves are caked with a sort of black tar.
Evening sun peeks over the horizon through rusted steel water towers and other ancient skeletons. Their frames stand fixed, albeit hunched forward, anchored in by the ankles in scrap iron dunes that stretch for miles with frigid desert rats scurrying through as giant shivering Scarabs hover in the sky: wired-in and vigilant, murmuring ancient mantras, overshadowing newer, but desperately cruel partisan inscriptions of code in the soot-stained brick facade.

Look at your superimposed reflection in the window across from your seat and envision subatomic particles acquiring sentience in the vacuum of an Accelerator. All wondering how it is they got there, who it is they presume to be.

Always wondering. Spiraling...really! Always spiraling at breakneck speeds through the vacuum—eternally in doubt. You are suddenly reminded of the words of that great Algorithmist painter, Carlotta Wakefield, 'Mediocre painters portray that which they understand. Fabulous painters: that which they Surmise...'

You wonder if that, too, applies to our constructions of reality, ersatz or otherwise.

(From the short story "Leapfrog")”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“We're programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We're not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

There's a subtle reason why programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: They are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It's harder to read code than to write it.”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“Code is there to explain the comments to the computer.”
― Andy Harris

“The only thing worse than not knowing why some code breaks is not knowing why it worked in the first place! It's the classic "house of cards" mentality: "it works, but I'm not sure why, so nobody touch it!" You may have heard, "Hell is other people" (Sartre), and the programmer meme twist, "Hell is other people's code."
I believe truly: "Hell is not understanding my own code.”
― Kyle Simpson, You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance

“GIFT A TIME...
SEED A MAP...
TURN A KEY...
WHORL A RING...”
― Jonathan McKinney

“Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for.”
― Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software

“Because code is poetry”
― Melissa Ratsch, Erwachen

“To get this right, you’d have to know what codes were doing the round in the eighteenth century, wouldn’t you? Mind you, it ain’t always easy. You’ve heard of the Voynich Manuscript?’
‘No.’
‘A scientific book, at least four hundred years old, written in code. No one’s ever managed to crack that one, not even you modern whizz-kids.”
― Adrian Mathews, The Apothecary’s House

“There is no code that can't be cracked.”
― Ruby Mohan, The Kidnapping

“The code is a metaphor that works well for the genetic code or the rules of a cellular automaton. The code is bad metaphor for the continuously changing states of neurons as they run through their algorithmic programs. Imagine looking for a code in space and time for rule 110, iteration 1,234, position 820-870. To study the mechanism that led to that state, we look at the point before, the relation of how it happened, in all available detail. Is that useful? In the case of the rule 110 automaton, the same rule applies everywhere, so the instance reveals something general about the whole. This is the hope of the biological experiment as well. But what happens if the rule changes with every iteration, as discussed for transcription factor cascades? To describe changing rules of algorithmic growth for every instance in time and space and in different systems is not only a rather large endeavor, it also suffers from the same danger of undefined depth. It is a description of the system, a series of bits of endpoint information, not a description of a code sufficient to create the system. The code is the 'extremely small amount of information to be specified genetically,' as Willshaw and von der Malsburg put it, that is sufficient to encode the unfolding of information under the influence of time and energy. The self-assembling brain.”
― Peter Robin Hiesinger, The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter

“We are nothing but machines that churn out code in an industry ultimately governed by those who are good with _people_ rather than with computers.”
― Quora_User

“last night
you had a visitor;

the promise of
a brand new chapter
left her
fingerprints
all over your
awareness
for you to CSI
and hack the
code of hope.”
― Remy Alberi, The Comprehension Watch

“WW3D" they added, which was a code they used whenever one of them was feeling nervous about something.”
― Alex London, City of Thieves

“If you want more autonomy, why not code autonomy into the system?”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“Bro Code No.1: You never show interest in another bro's chicks/ girlfriends”
― Avijeet Das

“The moment a desire is born, the result is born, at least on the other side of the world. You just have to make a connection. Then time loses its significance.”
― Dushica Labovich, Salvador Dali

“The process of effective studying and learning involves coding the information in the brain and also setting time to decode it out”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“...And So It Came To Pass, Inna Whorl Turn Ring A Portal Rifts A Vortex, The Key Sages A Gift, And The Past Maps The Future, To The East...Always To The East...”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Inna Map Mapped A Key, Inna Sage Saged A Gift, Inna Whorl Turn Ring A Portal Rifts A Vortex...”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Space Time : Inna Map Mapped A Key, Inna Sage Saged A Gift, Inna Whorl Turn Ring A Portal Rifts A Vortex...”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Space Element Time Set: Fire Turns Portals Inna Vortex Rift Key, Wind Maps Innas Whorl Puzzle Cube Ring, Water Sages Oaks Earth Inna's Set Trade...”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Occy's Perfect Sort For World Map Key”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Xora's P.A.S.S.A.G.E. XP: Sage, Gift, Pass, Staff Of Apocalypse, Sacred Globes, Light, Resistance, Square Abstract, Quad, Circle, Rectangle.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“Roblox Returns Rows Or Blocks Inna Setup, The Standard Normal Distribution Returns The Ordered Set Inna SORT.”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“SΦRT = Return Inna Ordered Set”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“AI Brain Model > Xor Itemizer × Abstracter = 1111; Xor Circlet + Diadem * Ring = 11; Xor PiRandom = 1; 1111>11>1 = 3><2><1 = 11”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney Gero EagleO2

“To the Priory of Sion, the secret organization described in the novel “The DaVinci Code,” the Bear was an animal of the Goddess Diana. The Merovingian kings, from their founder Merovee to Clovis (who converted to Christianity in 496) were kings who worshipped the Goddess Diana.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis