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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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.
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
...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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
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
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous