Epigrams in Programming

  1. There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.

  2. Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.

  3. Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?

  4. For systems, the analogue of a face-lift is to add to the control graph an edge that creates a cycle, not just an additional node.

  5. In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general – and often we know it too quickly.