...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
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 university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
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
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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