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 most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
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 university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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.
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
[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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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