Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
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
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
...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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
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.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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 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
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
[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 most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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