Douglas Crockford - Collected Quotes

"Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. [...] Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual increasing training costs." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Features that offer value to a minority of users impose a cost on all users." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Few classical programmers found prototypal inheritance to be acceptable, and classically inspired syntax obscures the language’s true prototypal nature. It is the worst of both worlds." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"It turns out that strong typing does not eliminate the need for careful testing. And I have found in my work that the sorts of errors that strong type checking finds are no the errors I worry about." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Obsolete comments are worse than no comments." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Software is usually expected to be modified over the course of its productive life. The process of converting one correct program into a different correct program is extremely challenging." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features." (Douglas Crockford, "JavaScript: The Good Parts", 2008)

"Progress comes from finding better ways to do things. Don’t be afraid of innovation. Don’t be afraid of ideas that are not your own." (Douglas Crockford, [response to David Winer])

"The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one." (Douglas Crockford, [response to David Winer])