Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
[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
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.
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
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