Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
...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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
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.
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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
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
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
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune