I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
--Robert Nystrom
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif