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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay