Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
[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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
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
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
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
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
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous