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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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.
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince