[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
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry 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
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
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
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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha