A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
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
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham