I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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