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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
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
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 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
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
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