People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
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
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
...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