In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".
Edsger DijkstraThe computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
Edsger DijkstraAre you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?
Edsger DijkstraIf you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.
Edsger DijkstraIn this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".
Edsger Dijkstra