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
'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
--George Bernard Shaw
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
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
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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 most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
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