The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
...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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune