If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
[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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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