Programming Quotations

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Any nerd who grew up around the time that I did, BBC programming was a treasure chest for us.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Pay-TV companies that built their businesses on the backs of local and network broadcast signals should pay a fair price for access to that high-value programming.

The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.

Nevertheless, I consider OOP as an aspect of programming in the large; that is, as an aspect that logically follows programming in the small and requires sound knowledge of procedural programming.

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Beauty is our business.

A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal.

The system is only as good as the person programming it. If you don't have the follow-through, your system is useless. And by the way, it's that way in parenting; it's that way in marriages.

Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

Internet! Is that thing still around?

Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour.

Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.

If you think something is impossible, don't disturb the person who is doing it!

Learning. It's really the primary reason behind everything I do. Programming, entrepreneuring, writing.

Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.

Your choice of programming model also is your choice of programming model, so to speak.

Ethernet always wins.

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.

In English every word can be verbed.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

Any noun can be verbed.

Optimization hinders evolution.

If we can't program it, we can't understand it.

The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.

Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

Successful software always gets changed.

Don't worry about how things are. Watch where they are headed.

Don't tell television, but there is some superior programming being made on the Interwebz.

With .NET once an API is published it's available to all programming languages at the same time.

Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.

If they can shut down ABC News and ABC network programming just because they don't agree on something, it makes you wonder

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

In the particular is contained the universal.

Don't ask what it means, but rather how it is used.

Ive enjoyed programming on NPR, but were broke and therefore all spending must be reduced.

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

Programming is usually taught by examples.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

When in doubt, use brute force.

I just want things to work properly.

Software sucks because users demand it to.

To understand this whole area, you have to stop thinking like a viewer and start thinking like a network programming exec.

I skip through the programming to watch the commercials.

Apple likes me, but they strongly prefer my money.

It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

I love doing the music. I love programming beats and kind of working on the music as much, if not more, than the actual rapping.

The number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double in about 18 months.

It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins.

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

It's against my programming to impersonate a deity.

Testing is not the point. The point is about responsibility.

I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!

Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.

Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts.

BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?

Culture is your operating system.

My programming language was solder.

Programming is an explanatory activity.