Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison