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 important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
[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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
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
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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.
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
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