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
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack
--Kernighan Brian
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.
--Theodore H. White
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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
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
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
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?
--Alan J. Perlis
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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 best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay