Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
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
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
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
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.
--Paul Graham
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
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
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
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.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler