A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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 personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
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
...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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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 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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
--Theodore H. White
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic