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 Think twice, code once. --Waseem Latif 'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability. --George Bernard Shaw 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 That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. --Larry Niven Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard. --unknown 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 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 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 A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points --Alan Kay Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail. --Max Kanat-Alexander 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 Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. --Keith Bostic 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 What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time? --James Alan Gardner A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. --John Ciardi Happiness should be a function without any parameters. --Pranshu Midha When in doubt, do something. --Harry Chapin Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. --Louis Srygley Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning. --Isaac Traxler The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines. --Steve McConnell The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user. --C.A.R. Hoare 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 I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits. --Kent Beck Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist --Pablo Picasso There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge. --Jon Erickson A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. --Unix Fortune Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. --Alan Kay Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. --Edsger W. Dijkstra How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules? --Anonymous Premature optimization is the root of all evil. --Donald Knuth Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. --Nartin Fowler [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 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 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 Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them. --Joshua Bloch Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it. --Donald Knuth The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language. --Alan Kay
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