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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
[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
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
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
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--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
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
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