Not only do programmers have staunch views on the ways of other tribal cultures, they also have some interesting thoughts within their own culture. They have chosen a profession of such complexity with numerous variables there is no single chief of the tribe that will show them the way. They are constantly learning as they go, as they must keep up with the changing trend of code. Some of them get it and dis those that don’t, some get frustrated and ask those who know, but all of them seem to thrive on the ‘thrill of victory’ or the ‘agony of defeat’.

On Debugging

"It works on my machine."
— Anonymous

"I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
— Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are — by definition — not smart enough to debug it."
— Brian Kernighan

"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
— Martin Golding

Failure should be expected. The faster you can recover from it, the better programmer you are.
— Tim Fischer

"The activity of "debugging" ends when people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed."
— "Datamation", January 15, 1984

On Programming Code

There are more languages being used out there than you might imagine. It wasn't long ago that the web was simply coded in HTML, Java and C++. Google is now using 'Python' (I know this because I Googled them), as does YouTube. Behind the visual skin of a website or software, the average user has no idea what language is being used to drive it (nor do I most of the time). Programmers rarely agree on which code is the best for the job, but are the first ones to dis the one they have to use, or the ones they don't know, but are easily used by others. Here are some of their thoughts on the languages they use.

PHP
PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."
— Jon Ribbens

C++
"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed."
— Bob Gray

"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
— Bjarne Stroustrup

"Manually managing blocks of memory in C is like juggling bars of soap in a prison shower: It's all fun and games until you forget about one of them.
— Unknown Usenet poster

Java
"Java is, in many ways, C++."
— Michael Feldman

Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.
— James Gosling, co-inventor of Java

"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution."
— Robert Sewell

Python
"Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language."
— Peter Norvig, Director of Search Quality, Goggle, Inc.

"Python is fast enough for our site and allows us to produce maintainable features in record times, with a minimum of developers.
— Cuong Do, Software Architect, YouTube.com

Ada
"C treats you like a consenting adult. Pascal treats you like a naughty child. Ada treats you like a criminal."
— Bruce Powel Douglass

APL
"APL is a write only language: You can write programs in it; but try and read them!"
— Anonymous

COBOL
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
— Edsger Dijkstra

"COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods."
— Anonymous

Fortran
"You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers."
— Steven Feiner

Haskell
"Haskell is faster than C++, more concise than Perl, more regular than Python, more flexible than Ruby, more typeful than C#, more robust than Java, and has absolutely nothing in common with PHP."
— Audrey Tang

Lisp
"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."
— Larry Wall in Usenet article

Ruby
"Some may say Ruby is a bad rip-off of Lisp or Smalltalk, and I admit that. But it is nicer to ordinary people."
— Matz, LL2

Perl
"If I were chained to a bench and 'perl' was the only thing that could open the lock, I'd probably cut my hand off."
— Gerald Penn

Unintelligible Questions

When programmers want answers they turn to other programmers. I found these questions on Anders Sandvig’s Blog — a well-known computer programmer and software developer. I could maybe answer the question about where a programmer should go on vacation. Otherwise...

- How many lines of debugged code do you produce in a day's work?
- How do I make my colleagues not despise SVN?
- Improving Python readability?
- CVS to SVN conversion and reorganizing branches
- Do you program for profit?
- Which programming tools do you pay for?
- Organizing the source code base when mixing two or more languages (like Java and C++)
- Stack overflow code golf
- When should a multi-module project to split into separate repository trees?
- What's the easiest way to read a FoxPro DBF file from Python?
- Why do you like Python?
- What's the most egregious pop culture perversion of programming?
- Do you eat your own dogfood?
- Where to wrap a line of code, especially long argument lists?
- How to use SVN, Branch? Tag? Trunk?
- How to best version design documents?
- How relevant is Win32 programming to modern professionals?
- What (free) web development IDEs do people use?
- Corner desks vs straight desks
- How do I create graphs in Perl on Windows?
- Does generated code need to be human readable?
- Linux GUI development
- What's a good way to encapsulate data access with PHP/MySQL?
- Is it possible to automatically make checkouts from any VCS?
- How do you embed binary data in XML?
- Best practice for storing large amounts of data with J2ME
- Listen for events in another application.
- How can I learn about parser combinators?
- How do you find a needle in a haystack?
- Refactoring away labeled loops.
- Java Coding standard / best practices - labeled break/continue
- Developer Feeling Stuck At Current Job
- Java configuration framework
- If you had to pick the best artifact in scrum, what would it be?
- Counting number of views for a page ignoring search engines?
- Making sure a web page is not cached, across all browsers.
- Source Control for Everyone?
- Scoring Poker Hands with Deuces Wild
- What does 'foo' really mean?
- How often to commit changes to source control ?
- Sleeping problems, computer addiction
- quick selection of a random row from a large table in mysql
- How to best update a website from subversion.
- What kind of constructive criticism would help a development team?
- After C++ - Python or Java?
- Could we please be a bit nicer to the noobs?
- Vacation suggestions for a programmer?
- Creating a unique alphanumeric 10-character string
- How did you get your first programming job?
- Best hosted wiki solution for private wikis?
- How can I hide content in a HTML file from search engines?
- How would you implement database updates via email?
- What is your approach to learning a new language or framework?
- How do you convince your boss not to jump on every hype?
- How do you structure a development sprint?
- In what order are locations searched to load referenced DLLs?
- What is the best way to convert an array to a hash in Ruby
- Resources of techniques use for collision detection in 2D?
- Attaching to a foreign executable in Visual C++ 2003
- How do I tell Maven to use the latest version of a dependency?
- Most efficient way to get data from the database to session (4)
- What is the best free memory leak detector for a C/C++ program and its plug-in DLLs?