I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
[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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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.
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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