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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly.
--Joe Armstrong
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
[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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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 in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
|