A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
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
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
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.
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
[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
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
--Donald Knuth
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter