The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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 university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra