Tom Van Vleck Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.'"