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
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
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 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
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.
--Martin Fowler
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Happiness should be a function without any parameters.
--Pranshu Midha
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
...I’m not saying simple code takes less time to write. You’d think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn’t an accretion of code, it’s a distillation of it.
--Robert Nystrom
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
Along every step of our journey through life, our mind is being programmed. If we are not programming it ourselves, someone else is doing it to us.
--Joseph Rain