The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong.
--Ken Thompson
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
...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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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.
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
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard