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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.
--Andrew Hunt
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
[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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra