Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
...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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
[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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler