Quotes from "Jean-Paul Sartre’s Programming in ANSI C"

Philosophy of a Software Programmer

17 February 2016

A few days ago, I read a blog post titled “Write code that was easy to delete, not easy to extend”. At the top of this blog post was a quote…

“Every line of code is written without reason, maintained out of weakness, and deleted by chance.” Jean-Paul Sartre’s Programming in ANSI C[1]

I was so fasinciated by this profound quote that I didn’t even bother reading the rest of the blog post and decided to find this obscure book and read it myself.

I don’t agree with all of what Sartre has written; his ideas about individualism reads a bit too utopian for my tastes. However, his ideas are still interesting to read. Here are a few choice quotes from the book.

[1]”Jean-Paul Sartre’s Programming in ANSI C” is a fictional book. The philosopher himself is real, as are the quotes, but almost all of them were modified to take into account the subject matter of programming.

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