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 A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points --Alan Kay Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. --Paul Graham First solve the problem. Then, write the code. --Waseem Latif 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 The best way to predict the future is to invent it --Alan Kay 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 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 That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. --Larry Niven A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. --John Ciardi 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 How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules? --Anonymous [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 A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. --Unix Fortune It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good. --Hary Chapin 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 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 Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. --Nartin Fowler People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware --Alan Kay 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 Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. --Edward V. Berard College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility. --Dennis Miller Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard. --unknown Think twice, code once. --Waseem Latif People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware --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
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