There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
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
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary delivery ■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day
--Steve McConnell
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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