How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
[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 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
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
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 language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
The personal computer isn't "personal" because it's small and portable and yours to own. It's "personal" because you pour yourself into it - your thoughts, your programming.
--Audrey Watters
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
...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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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