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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.
--Larry Wall
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
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