#programming

Once an object escapes, you have to assume that another class or thread may, maliciously or carelessly, misuse it. This is a compelling reason to use encapsulation: it makes it practical to analyze programs for correctness and harder to violate design constraints accidentally. ↗

— Brian Goetz

#java #programming #design

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. ↗

— Daniel Keys Moran

#humor

On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries - without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. ↗

— Marc Andreessen

#easy #employees #end #global #industries

We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it's faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming. ↗

— Rowan Atkinson

#certainly #challenging #english #faded #five

I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming. ↗

— Ted Koppel

#excellent #fan #i #ideas #many

I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while. ↗

— Francis Ford Coppola

#growing #growing up #i #i remember #just

MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming. ↗

— Brit Hume

#channel #doing #first-class #good #good people

I don't think people realize the extent to which TV networks are hurt when they carry public broadcasting. I think the estimate is that they lose a half-million dollars for a half day's programming. ↗

— Roone Arledge

#carry #day #dollars #estimate #extent

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation. Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#humor #programming #humor

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it. ↗

— Marvin Minsky

#sicp #imagination