What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
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.
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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 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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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
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 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
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
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
[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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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