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When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature.

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More quotes by Kent Beck

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.

Extreme Programming Explained (2000)

When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby.

Kent Beck As cited in: Giles Bowkett (2007)

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kent Beck (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.