Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
[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
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
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
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
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
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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
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.
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