alex

Sayings I use, only some of which are actually originally attributable to me. Anyone with research on a saying's provenance, feel free to comment. This page, unlike a normal blog entry, will be updated as needed with stuff I find myself saying with air quotes.

A comment is a lie waiting to happen.

"Legacy" means any program that people are actually using.

(Feathers: "Legacy" means "no tests.")

If you try hard enough, you can make anything fail.

There's no such thing as human error. (Only system error.)

If you pay attention to something, it gets better.

It's always a people problem. (Jerry Weinberg)

You can see a lot by looking. (Yogi Berra)

Yogi wrote a book called "You Can Observe A Lot By Watching" but I prefer to think he was misquoting himself.

Language Log has a take on this quote: She was seeing at me

Object-Oriented Programming is like teenage sex: everyone says they're doing it; few actually are; and those who are rarely know what they're doing. (Anonymous, via Misko)

Here's a simple test for whether you're doing it right: Is your data in the same class as the methods accessing it? Oh, really? Check again.

Double negatives are not unconfusing.