Programming Quotes

“when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”
― Why The Lucky Stiff

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
― Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“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 Wizardry Compiled

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”
― John Woods

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
― Martin Fowler

“Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others, self-harm, and suicide attempts.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”
― Kent Beck

“Truth can only be found in one place: the code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

“Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day.
Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.”
― Muhammad Waseem

“How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.”
― Larry Niven

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
― Charles Babbage

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”
― Edward V. Berard

“The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”
― Alan Kay

“The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
― Joseph Weizenbaum

“Enlightenment is the unprogrammed state.”
― Jed McKenna

“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

“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.”
― Marvin Minsky

“You Can't Write Perfect Software. Did that hurt? It shouldn't. Accept it as an axiom of life. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Because perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It's unlikely that you'll be the first. And unless you accept this as a fact, you'll end up wasting time and energy chasing an impossible dream.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Big Brother fills us all with the same crap. My guess is he was clever the same way everybody thinks they're clever. I tell her to type in 'password”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible sales-men. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.”
― Robert C. Martin

“Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.”
― Joshua Bloch, Effective Java : Programming Language Guide

“If, at first, you do not succeed, call it version 1.0.”
― Khayri R.R. Woulfe

“Programming is about managing complexity: the complexity of the problem, laid upon the complexity of the machine. Because of this complexity, most of our programming projects fail.”
― Bruce Eckel, On Java 8