Quotes About Control

Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes?

For every "Drive Safely" sign, shouldn't there be a "Resume Normal Driving" sign?

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive.

A man in armor is his armor's slave.

We need to let go of the illusion that we can control this life business. We cannot. We never could! It was an illusion. And we need to let go of the false beliefs that tell us that we are bad and shameful. We cannot become whole as long as we believe that any part of us is bad or shameful.

It's hardly in a body's pow'r, To keep, at times, frae being sour.

Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

Everything, saith Epictetus, hath two handles,the one to be held by, the other not.

[The rich] are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors.

Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer's intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control. - Grady Booch author of Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications

Good software designs accommodate change without huge investments and rework. When we use code that is out of our control, special care must be taken to protect our investment and make sure future change is not too costly.

Dijkstra realized that these "good" uses of goto corresponded to simple selection and iteration control structures such as if/then/else and do/while. Modules that used only those kinds of control structures could be recursively subdivided into provable units.

We are confidently commanding, in precise detail, the behaviors of a machine that could otherwise do incalculable damage. And so, programming is an act of supreme arrogance.

OO imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control.

Structured programming is discipline imposed upon direct transfer of control.

Object-oriented programming is discipline imposed upon indirect transfer of control.

Duplication may be the root of all evil in software. Many principles and practices have been created for the purpose of controlling or eliminating it.

Code at the boundaries needs clear separation and tests that define expectations. We should avoid letting too much of our code know about the third-party particulars. It's better to depend on something you control than on something you don't control, lest it end up controlling you.

Think about how you can preserve the use-case emphasis of your architecture. Develop a strategy that prevents the framework from taking over that architecture.

Structured programming imposes discipline on direct transfer of control.

Object-oriented programming imposes discipline on indirect transfer of control.

Functional programming imposes discipline upon assignment.

There was a time, back in the sixties, when commenting-out code might have been useful. But we've had good source code control systems for a very long time now. Those systems will remember the code for us. We don't have to comment it out any more. Just delete the code. We won't lose it. Promise.