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

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.

• “Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as Assembly.”
• “A programmer is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the codebase, he is responsible for everything he does.”
• “Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be programmers.”
• “If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The codebase is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.”
• “You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest programmer.”
• “The more one is absorbed in fighting bad programming, the less one is tempted to write good programs.”
• “Do you think you can program innocently?”
• “As far as programmers go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”
• “A programmer cannot will unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned in the codebase in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself in his IDE.”
• “I do not give a damn about the previous programmers. They died for the codebase and the codebase can decide what it wants. I practice a live man’s politics, for the living.”
• “We programmers exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
• “How can I, who was not able to retain my own past knowledge of the codebase, hope to teach another?”
• “I embraced Agile because its cause was just and I will leave Agile when it ceases to be just.”
• “Ah! Do not judge the gurus, young man, for they too have painful secrets.”
• “If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.”
• “I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish design patterns made especially to humiliate me.”
• “What do you want to do with the language? Write Fizz-Buzz? What good is it to sharpen a knife every day if you never use it for slicing? Code is never more than a means. There is only one objective: power.”

[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.