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.
Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively
--Dalai Lama XIV
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
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 best way to predict the future is to invent it
--Alan Kay
A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points
--Alan Kay
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.
--Steve McConnell
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
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
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
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
What is a university/college when the students lose interest?
--Isaac Traxler
The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.
--C.A.R. Hoare
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
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
--Edsger W. Dijkstra