"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
“If you love writing code -- really, truly love to write code -- you'll love it enough to write as little of it as possible.”
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
“Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance.”
- Jon Franklin
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation."
“Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.”
“... In fact, never ever use gets() or sprintf(), period. If you do, we will send evil dwarfs after you.”
- FreeBSD, Secure Programming Guidelines
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
All that you do will inevitably be flavored with uncertainty...
Tolstoy, in the Age Before Typewriters, re-wrote War & Peace eight times and was still revising galley proofs as it finally rolled onto the press. William Kennedy gamely admitted that he re-wrote his own novel Legs eight times, and that "seven times it came out no good. Six times it was especially no good. The seventh time out it was pretty good, though it was way too long. My son was six years old by then and so was my novel and they were both about the same height..."
Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending. The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all - or having gotten there, you may not have said anything...
Simply put, making art is chancy - it doesn't mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the pre-requisite to succeeding.
- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear
“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
“Leap and the net will appear.”
- Zen saying
“The second-most important thing you will do in your entire life, from amniotic sac to deathbed, is screw up. And I'm not restricting the discussion to your creative output either; I'm talking the entire kiwi fruit.
The most important thing you will do is deal with screwing up.
Bet on it.
As acceptance takes less energy than denial, and available energy is one of the major limiting factors on creativity, let's continue this investigation by aligning with acceptance...
We have penicillin because Alexander Fleming screwed up. We have iodine-doped plastics that conduct electricity as well or better than copper because a grad student of Hidek Shirakawa's screwed up. We have pthalocyanine oil paints because an insecticide chemist screwed up. We have The War of the Worlds because Giovanni Schiaparelli's translator screwed up. We have quantum theory because God laughed, and Heisenberg got the joke when Einstein didn't.”
- Freff
"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong."
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
- Anais Nin
“Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working.”
- Anonymous