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 best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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 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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
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.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
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 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
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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter