The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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 important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
...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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay