The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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.
--Unix Fortune
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
[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
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
--Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin