Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
--Edward V. Berard
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
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live
--John Woods
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
Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.
--Max Kanat-Alexander
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Nartin Fowler
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
I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck
Delivering good software today is often better than perfect software tomorrow, so finish things and ship.
--David Thomas
There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.
--Jon Erickson
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Alan Perlis
College is a waystation - the last convenience store on the road to life-long responsibility.
--Dennis Miller
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
First solve the problem. Then, write the code.
--Waseem Latif
It's got to be the going not the getting there that's good.
--Hary Chapin
How do you expect to succeed if you do not know the rules?
--Anonymous
Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
--Martin Fowler
...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
Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.
--Joshua Bloch
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
--John Ciardi
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
--Unix Fortune
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
Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we're programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.
--Prince
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
When in doubt, do something.
--Harry Chapin
If the steps become to big, they become walls...
--Herb Sutter
Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.
--Chris Pine
Twenty hours at the keyboard can save you two hours of planning.
--Isaac Traxler
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
--perldoc perl