It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
There ain't no rules around here. We are trying to accomplish something.
--Thomas Edison
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware
--Alan Kay
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
--Larry Niven
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
Not only is this incomprehensible, but the ink is ugly and the paper is from the wrong kind of tree.
--Professor W.
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 three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
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
Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
--Keith Bostic
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
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
Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
--Pablo Picasso
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
Think twice, code once.
--Waseem Latif
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
[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
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
Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.
--Louis Srygley
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune