Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.
--Robert C. Martin
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
[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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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