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42 Timeless Programming Quotes
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5 min readDec 8, 2021
Last Sunday (Dec 5) was the birthday of Uncle Bob, the father of the clean code movement and the Agile Manifesto.
As I was thinking about his contributions, I felt compelled to pay homage to all the wisdom-bearers of the programming world so far. I could not come up with this soon enough, because gathering transformative thoughts from across 6–7 decades of work was not an easy task.
Some of them also helped me steer through my senior developer interviews, for they reveal age-old, time-tested bits of programming wisdom. I have indicated them below with an asterisk (*).
Design
#1:(*) Functions should do something, or answer something, but not both - Robert C. Martin (aka Uncle Bob, Creator of Clean Code & Agile Manifesto)
#2: (*) Context is worth 80 IQ points - Alan Kay (OOP pioneer)
#3: Master programmers think of systems as stories to be told rather than programs to be written - Robert C. Martin#4: (*) In order to make sure our functions are doing ‘one thing’, we need to make sure that the statements within the function are all at the same level of abstraction - Robert C. Martin
