Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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.
--Nartin Fowler
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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
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
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
[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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell