Masterminds of Programming

A few interesting and amusing quotes from the book Masterminds of Programming:

Some 20 years ago I wanted to develop a tool to design VLSI chips. I didn’t have a Forth for my new PC, so I thought I’d try a different approach: machine language. Not assembler language, but actually typing the hex instructions. […] My conclusion was that Forth is more efficient than machine language. Partly because of its interactivity and partly because of its syntax.
—Charles Moore

My opinion is that OOP is one of the great frauds perpetrated on the community. […] OOP was designed so that its clients could claim superior wisdom for being on the “inside”. The truth of the matter is that the single most important aspect of OOP is an approach devised decades ago: encapsulation of subroutines and data. All the rest is frosting.
—Thomas E. Kurtz

The best way to avoid tough debugging is to write things very carefully in the first place.
—Brian Kernighan

Software engineering is in many ways a very pathetic field, because so much of it is anecdotal and based on people’s judgments or even people’s aesthetic judgments.
—Peter Weinberger

C is a reasonably good language for compilers to generate, but the idea that human beings should program in it is completely absurd.
—Bertrand Meyer