Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
--Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
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
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 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
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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
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
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
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 big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler