programming

Almost every software development organization has at least one developer who takes tactical programming to the extreme: a tactical tornado. The tactical tornado is a prolific programmer who pumps out code far faster than others but works in a totally tactical fashion. When it comes to implementing a quick feature, nobody gets it done faster than the tactical tornado. In some organizations, management treats tactical tornadoes as heroes. However, tactical tornadoes leave behind a wake of destruction. They are rarely considered heroes by the engineers who must work with their code in the future. Typically, other engineers must clean up the messes left behind by the tactical tornado, which makes it appear that those engineers (who are the real heroes) are making slower progress than the tactical tornado.

Good code is not just a “beautiful” code. It's code you can modify fast. That speed is crucial for the business and the key to building a successful product.

All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough.

Deleted code is debugged code.

The best way to learn is rewriting.

Weak security that’s easy to use will help more people than strong security that’s hard to use.

Before it was called slack we just called it IRC with a webinterface. Re-inventing and centralising the wheel, a recipe for great success.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

I think it’s highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence,” says Bostic, looking back. “It was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea.

Keith Bostic (of the Berkeley CSRG), openly credits Stallman with the free software push that BSD then followed with, recounting numerous discussions on copyright with Stallman when he visited Berkeley

A computer is a state machine. Threads are for people who can’t program state machines.