Jon Bentley's books Programming Pearls (1986) and More Programming Pearls (1988) are collections of his witty and worthy columns from Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (a wonderful name for a journal, eh?!). Bentley's March 1986 piece ("Bumper-Sticker Computer Science") offers some memorable aphorisms, many of which are relevant in countless other areas of life. A sampling:

• "When in doubt, use brute force." (Ken Thompson)
• "Avoid asymmetry." (Andy Huber)
• "Details count." (Peter Weinberger)
• "Of all my programming bugs, 80% are syntax errors. Of the remaining 20%, 80% are trivial logical errors. Of the remaining 4%, 80% are pointer errors. And the remaining 0.8% are hard." (Marc Donner)
• "A {specification, design, procedure, test plan} that will not fit on one page of 8.5-by-11 inch paper cannot be understood." (Mark Ardis)
• "The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it." (Richard E. Fairley)
• "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." (Tom Cargill)
• "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement." (Fred Brooks)
• "Good customer relations double productivity." (Larry Bernstein)
• "Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow." (Fred Brooks)
• "Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." (H. H. Williams)

and best of all, a meta-proverb:

• "Eschew clever rules." (Joe Condon)

TopicProgramming - 2001-12-04

(correlates: Worst and Bad, SmallInfinity, Donald Knuth, ...)