How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary delivery ■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day
--Steve McConnell
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
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
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.
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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