Code Bugs Quotes

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard
for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance
close to optimal so as not to tempt
people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well.

-Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++
and author of The C++ Programming
Language ~ Robert C. Martin

It's true, I had hacked into a lot of companies, and took copies of the source code to analyze it for security bugs. If I could locate security bugs, I could become better at hacking into their systems. It was all towards becoming a better hacker. ~ Kevin Mitnick

Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time. ~ Robert Duchnik

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor. ~ Brian Kernighan

The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going offline. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code. ~ Ryan Boudinot

There'll be the lightning bugs with their Morse code display,
And shooting stars and constellations to befriend;
The dragonflies will keep us from going astray,
As we search for new adventures 'round every bend.
-excerpted from the poem 'The Huge Playroom that is Nature' in the book FROM GUAM TO CROWN CITY CORONADO (THANKS TO HERMANN, MISSOURI): A JOURNEY IN POESY ~ Mariecor Ruediger

We must not blame programmers for their bugs. They belong to them only until the code is merged to the repository. After that, all bugs are ours! ~ Yegor Bugayenko

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. ~ Ellen Ullman

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code. ~ Tony Hoare

Errors in code are what programmers call bugs, though when our programs go wrong, we prefer to call them "unexpected additional features." Very ~ Paul Wilton