Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.
--Cory Althoff
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
--James Alan Gardner
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary delivery ■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day
--Steve McConnell
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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