The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
...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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--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
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