The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth