That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
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
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
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