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
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
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
...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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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