Jun 272008
 

quoted from http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/vacation.html

Boss, what's vacation?

"Boss, can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Everyone's always talking about vacations and free time and things like that. How come I never have any?"

"You wouldn't like it."

"But they think it's better than work. They really look forward to it."

"Remember last year, when the office was shut down for a week."

"When they replaced all windows? Sure I remember. I couldn't play with a computer for a week. Horrible."

"Vacations are like that."

"Oh."

"So you wouldn't like them."

"But everyone else does."

"Ah, but that's because they're lusers, not hackers."

"Oh."

"Now go back and write that compiler. We need it last week."

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Jun 272008
 

quoted from http://liw.fi/programming-truths/

Originally written in 1995.
This page contains a number of important programming truths that every budding programmer should know about. These truths are self-evident, and need no explanations.

If it compiles, it works.
If it compiles, it’s correct.
If it runs, it doesn’t have any bugs.
If it doesn’t have any immediately obvious bugs, it’s perfect.
If a bug doesn’t show, it doesn’t exist.
If it seems to work, it works.
Doing something right is easy. Avoiding errors only takes a bit of concentration.
The shorter the source code, the faster the program.
It’s obvious how to optimize a program.
Prorammers don’t make mistakes.

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