A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
...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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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.
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay