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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
[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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
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