The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
One knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
--Brian Kernighan
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.
--Steven S. Skiena
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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.
The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
...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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
--Larry Wall
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler