Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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 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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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.
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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