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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
--Theodore H. White
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
--Larry Wall
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
[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 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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay