When in doubt, do something.
--Harry 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
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
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 is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
--Richard Stallman
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
[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
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin