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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
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
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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.
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
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown