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
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
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
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
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
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