Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV