Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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.
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
[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 university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
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