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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--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.
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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