Bjarne Stroustrup Quotes

"How to test?" is a question that cannot be answered in general. "When to test?" however, does have a general answer: as early and as often as possible.

"Legacy code" is a term often used derogatorily to characterize code that is written in a language or style that (1) the speaker/writer consider outdated and/or (2) is competing with something sold/promoted by the speaker/writer. "Legacy code" often differs from its suggested alternative by actually working and scaling.

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

A program that has not been tested does not work.

Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naïve or a salesman.

People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't.

[Corporate programming] is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate "culture" with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful.

There are more useful systems developed in languages deemed awful than in languages praised for being beautiful — many more.

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.

If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor — meaning you have to work on the manual.

I do not think that safety should be bought at the cost of complicating the expression of good solutions to real-life problems.

Maybe "just one little global variable" isn't too unmanageable, but that style leads to code that is useless except to its original programmer.

Far too often, "software engineering" is neither engineering nor about software.

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.