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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.
--Robert C. Martin
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell