Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong.
--Ken Thompson
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay