At work, we have a guy who I am pretty sure just goes out looking for email forwards to send out to everyone in the department. Usually these are complete and utter crap. But today, he struck a gold mine. And, therefore, I will share that wealth with you.

Here are the quotes.

Here are some samples to whet your appetite:

• Roy Carls: The sooner you start to code, the longer the program will take.
• Edward Tufte: There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users.
• Gerald Weinberg: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
• The Enlightenment Project: Our developers never release code. Rather, it tends to escape, pillaging the countryside all around.

• Theory is when you know something, but it doesn’t work. Practice is when something works, but you don’t know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: nothing works and they don’t know why.
• Debugging is like alien abduction. Large blocks of time disappear, for which you have no explanation.

This article was edited after publication by the author on 04 Dec 2009. View changes.