Tom Van Vleck Quotes

• I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"

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  Tom Van Vleck

  Writing   Recovery   Errors  

  538

• Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

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  Tom Van Vleck

  Real   Writing   Cobol  

  4069

• Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

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  Tom Van Vleck

  Real   Writing   Should  

  2779

• We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer - and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply.

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  Tom Van Vleck

  Agony   Water   Suffering  

  4176

• You learn something every day, unless you're careful.

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  Tom Van Vleck

  Careful  

  4928

• Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am it's because they were up all night.

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  Tom Van Vleck

  Real   Night   Programmers  

  1104

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