Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
...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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Programming is the art of thinking really hard about how to avoid having to think really hard.
--unknown
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
[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
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
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