Computer Programming Quotes

“Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. ...[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.”
― Alan J. Perlis, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“Pascal (Object Pascal - Free Pascal) for real programmers, Delphi for Nerds... C/C++ for people who always wishes to do things like reinventing the wheel.”
― Rejie Roque

“But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.”
― Ken Thompson

“You should do well but not really good. And the reason is that in the time it takes you to go from well to really good, Moore’s law has already surpassed you. You can pick up 10 percent but while you’re picking up that 10 percent, computers have gotten twice as fast and maybe with some other stuff that matters more for optimization, like caches. I think it’s largely a waste of time to do really well. It’s really hard; you generate as many bugs as you fix. You should stop, not take that extra 100 percent of time to do 10 percent of the work.”
― Ken Thompson

“Code for Humanity (The Sonnet)

There is no such thing as ethical hacking,
If it were ethical they wouldn't be teaching it.
Because like it or not ethics is bad for business,
They teach hacking so they could use it for profit.
With the right sequence of zeros and ones we could,
Equalize all bank accounts of planet earth tomorrow.
Forget about what glass house gargoyles do with tech,
How will you the human use tech to eliminate sorrow?
In a world full of greedy edisons, be a humble Tesla,
Time remembers no oligarch kindly no matter the status.
Only innovators who get engraved in people's heart,
Are the ones who innovate with a humane purpose.
Innovate to bridge the gap, not exploit and cater to disparities.
In a world run by algorithms of greed write a code that helps 'n heals.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“How do you get into making video games anyway? Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person told her he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school, I got an 800 on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig, and then I went to MIT, which, by the way, is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of. But yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., so...." Instead, she said, "I like to play games a lot, so I thought I'd see if I could make them.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Don't forget that computer programming teaches students to think," says a friend of mine who's a computer jock in Silicon valley. He's deeply invested in technology and has no kids. "Programming is a logical system that rewards clear reasoning."
Uh, sure. Nineteenth-century schoolmasters used the same reasoning to justify teaching ancient languages. According to computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, "There is, so far as I know, no more evidence that programming is good for the mind than Latin is.”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systemsand you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.”
― Joe Armstrong

“Coding Sonnet

One of the most powerful tools of science is coding,
A string of illegible characters can make or break a society.
145,000 lines of code landed Armstrong 'n Aldrin on the moon,
And 2 billion of them are working to satisfy everyday curiosity.
But this awesome force is still used mostly to generate revenue,
Welfare of humanity isn't a priority here, but a mere suggestion.
That's why the coding marvel that set out to connect the world,
Has become a playground for conspiracy, bigotry and division.
Learn from the horrific blunders of society's founding coders,
Make humanity the primary command of every code you write.
A code that doesn't lift the society is nothing but a hideous bug,
Zeros and Ones know no good or bad, unless by you it is defined.
Uncle Ben once said, with great power comes great responsibility.
I say to you today, a humane code facilitates a humane society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“We have to place our attention on humanizing artificial intelligence by removing the biases from algorithms rather than dehumanizing it.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systems and you’re paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there’s no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.”
― Joe Armstrong

“The most depressing thing about life as a programmer, I think, is if you’re faced with a chunk of code that either someone else wrote or, worse still, you wrote yourself but you no longer dare to modify. That’s depressing.”
― Petey Jones

“I often end up rewriting. Sometimes I do that without ever finding the bug. I get to the point where I can just feel that it’s in this part here. I’m just not very comfortable about this part. It’s a mess. It really shouldn’t be that way. Rather than tweak it a little bit at a time, I’ll just throw away a couple hundred lines of code, rewrite it from scratch, and often then the bug is gone. Sometimes I feel guilty about that. Is that a failure on my part? I didn’t understand what the bug was. I didn’t find the bug. I just dropped a bomb on the house and blew up all the bugs and built a new house. In some sense, the bug eluded me. But if it becomes the right solution, maybe it’s OK. You’ve done it faster than you would have by finding it.”
― Peter Norvig

“I literally have to turn off the computer because if the fan is whirring behind me there’s the lure of “Check your email, check your email.” So I’ll turn it off or at least put it to sleep, come over to this table on the other side of the room, and spread out my papers and think. Or work at the whiteboard or something.”
― Guy Steele

“I think it’s not an accident that we often use the imagery of magic to describe programming. We speak of computing wizards and we think of things happening by magic or automagically. And I think that’s because being able to get a machine to do what you want is the closest thing we’ve got in technology to adolescent wish-fulfillment.”
― Guy Steele

“the lesson I should have drawn is there may be more than one bug here and I should have looked harder the first time. But another lesson is that if a bug is thought to be rare, then looking at rarely executed paths may be fruitful. And a third thing is, having good documentation about what the algorithm is trying to do, namely a reference back to Knuth, was just great.”
― Guy Steele

“I don’t know that you’re that far out on the spectrum, at least among the people I’ve talked to for this book. Though Don Knuth did write TeX in pencil in a notebook for six months before he typed in a line of code and he said he saved time because he didn’t have to bother writing scaffolding to test all the code he was developing because he just wrote the whole thing.”
― Seibel, Coders At Work:Reflections On The Craft Of Programming

“In terms of a place to start, immediate gratification has always worked for me.”
― Dan Ingalls

“It isn’t that young people learn that much faster; it’s just they have more time. When I would put time in, I made progress.”
― Dan Ingalls

“When it’s hard to work on. I do it much quicker than most people do. I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard. I’ll throw it away and start over and come up with a different partitioning that makes it easy to do whatever I wanted to do. I’m really quick on the trigger for throwing stuff out.”
― Ken Thompson

“With the right sequence of zeros and ones we could equalize all bank accounts of planet earth tomorrow.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“In a world run by algorithms of greed write a code that helps 'n heals.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“In a world full of greedy edisons, be a humble Tesla,
Time remembers no oligarch kindly no matter the status.
Only innovators who get engraved in people's heart,
Are the ones who innovate with a humane purpose.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None

“SΦRT = Return Inna Ordered Set”
― Jonathan Roy Mckinney

“The rise of AI will be the end of I ...unless we are careful.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“Declutter is the sensible way forward,
So I moved from Windows to Chrome OS.
Less cluttered in mind and machine,
More you shall find the peaceful pace.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“I can manually debug a few hundred thousand lines. It won't be fun, but I ... who am I kidding, it will be fun.”
― Eliot Schrefer, The Darkness Outside Us