Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
--Theodore H. White
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
--Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
--Robert Nystrom
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know.
--Benjamin H Bratton
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong.
--Ken Thompson
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune