Top 100 Robert C. Martin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The only way to go fast, is to go well.”

— Robert C. Martin

2. “Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares.”

— Robert C. Martin

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3. “1. “First make it work.” You are out of business if it doesn’t work. 2. “Then make it right.” Refactor the code so that you and others can understand it and evolve it as needs change or are better understood. 3. “Then make it fast.” Refactor the code for “needed” performance.”

— Robert C. Martin

4. “It is not enough for code to work.”

— Robert C. Martin

5. “If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture. – Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder.”

— Robert C. Martin

6. “The goal of software architecture is to minimize the human resources required to build and maintain the required system.”

— Robert C. Martin

7. “You should name a variable using the same care with which you name a first-born child.”

— Robert C. Martin

8. “Honesty in small things is not a small thing.”

— Robert C. Martin

9. “Good architecture makes the system easy to understand, easy to develop, easy to maintain, and easy to deploy. The ultimate goal is to minimize the lifetime cost of the system and to maximize programmer productivity.”

— Robert C. Martin

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10. “If you are tired or distracted, do not code.”

— Robert C. Martin

11. “Some folks think that Agile is about going fast. It’s not. It’s never been about going fast. Agile is about knowing, as early as possible, just how screwed we are.”

— Robert C. Martin

12. “Don’t Use a Comment When You Can Use a Function or a Variable.”

— Robert C. Martin

13. “Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation’s communication structure.”

— Robert C. Martin

14. “The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made.”

— Robert C. Martin

15. “One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that the professional understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.”

— Robert C. Martin

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16. “The unit tests are documents. They describe the lowest-level design of the system.”

— Robert C. Martin

17. “Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean. Dave.”

— Robert C. Martin

18. “The first rule of functions is that they should be small. The second rule of functions is that they should be smaller than that.”

— Robert C. Martin

19. “I’m a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I’ve found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.”

— Robert C. Martin

20. “You should plan on working 60 hours per week. The first 40 are for your employer. The remaining 20 are for you. During this remaining 20 hours you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career.”

— Robert C. Martin

21. “A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.”

— Robert C. Martin

22. “If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot.”

— Robert C. Martin

23. “It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!”

— Robert C. Martin

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24. “Good software systems begin with clean code. On the one hand, if the bricks aren’t well made, the architecture of the building doesn’t matter much. On the other hand, you can make a substantial mess with well-made bricks. This is where the SOLID principles come in.”

— Robert C. Martin

25. “Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential.”

— Robert C. Martin

26. “The first value of software – behavior – is urgent but not always particularly important. The second value of software – architecture – is important but never particularly urgent.”

— Robert C. Martin

27. “Why do most developers fear to make continuous changes to their code? They are afraid they’ll break it! Why are they afraid they’ll break it? Because they don’t have tests.”

— Robert C. Martin

28. “Of course bad code can be cleaned up. But it’s very expensive.”

— Robert C. Martin

29. “The problem is that we view estimates in different ways. Business likes to view estimates as commitments. Developers like to view estimates as guesses. The difference is profound.”

— Robert C. Martin

30. “Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system. It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity.”

— Robert C. Martin

31. “Dijkstra once said, “Testing shows the presence, not the absence, of bugs.” In other words, a program can be proven incorrect by a test, but it cannot be proven correct. All that tests can do, after sufficient testing effort, is allow us to deem a program to be correct enough for our purposes.”

— Robert C. Martin

32. “The way you keep software soft is to leave as many options open as possible, for as long as possible. What are the options that we need to leave open? They are the details that don’t matter.”

— Robert C. Martin

33. “What makes a clean test? Three things. Readability, readability, and readability.”

— Robert C. Martin

34. “When you cannot concentrate and focus sufficiently, the code you write will be wrong. It will have bugs. It will have the wrong structure. It will be opaque and convoluted. It will not solve the customers’ real problems. In short, it will have to be reworked or redone. Working while distracted creates waste.”

— Robert C. Martin

35. “When you see commented-out code, delete it!”

— Robert C. Martin

36. “The cost of automating acceptance tests is so small in comparison to the cost of executing manual test plans that it makes no economic sense to write scripts for humans to execute.”

— Robert C. Martin

37. “It is not enough for code to work. Code that works is often badly broken. Programmers who satisfy themselves with merely working code are behaving unprofessionally. They may fear that they don’t have time to improve the structure and design of their code, but I disagree. Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code.”

— Robert C. Martin

Featured in: Programming Quotes

38. “Programming is a social activity.”

— Robert C. Martin

39. “A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.”

— Robert C. Martin

40. “The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code. Note that I used the word failure. I meant it. Comments are always failures.”

— Robert C. Martin

41. “When you are working on a problem, you sometimes get so close to it that you can’t see all the options. You miss elegant solutions because the creative part of your mind is suppressed by the intensity of your focus. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to go home, eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed, and then wake up the next morning and take a shower.”

— Robert C. Martin

42. “In fact, wrapping third-party APIs is a best practice. When you wrap a third-party API, you minimize your dependencies upon it:.”

— Robert C. Martin

43. “Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build, and test.” – Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft Corporation.”

— Robert C. Martin

44. “First Law You may not write production code until you have written a failing unit test. Second Law You may not write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail, and not compiling is failing. Third Law You may not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test.”

— Robert C. Martin

45. “Software has two types of value: the value of its behavior and the value of its structure. The second of these is the greater of the two because it is this value that makes software soft.”

— Robert C. Martin

46. “If a change to the requirements breaks your architecture, then your architecture sucks.”

— Robert C. Martin

47. “Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.”

— Robert C. Martin

48. “Flag arguments are ugly. Passing a boolean into a function is a truly terrible practice.”

— Robert C. Martin

49. “Error handling is important, but if it obscures logic, it’s wrong.”

— Robert C. Martin

50. “QA and Development should be working together to ensure the quality of the system. The.”

— Robert C. Martin