Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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.
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 best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
[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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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 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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
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
...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
--Robert Nystrom
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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