Best 218 quotes in «programming quotes» category

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

Television has certainly become a wasteland of quality programming.

Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

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.

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

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

The expensive ones are for Starz. No. We decided, as part of our Encore strategy, to broaden and strengthen and help focus the Encore plexus by adding original programming.

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

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

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

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

The pop-star thing bores me because it's somebody programming someone else. Stand over here, sing that, no, sing it like this, talk like that, when they ask you this, don't say that, say this, hold that, drive this, stay here, live there - you're not even a human being. You're a puppet.

The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less.

The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.

[The Internet] is a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.

The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.

There is this thing called the GPL (Gnu Public Licence), which we disagree with... nobody can ever improve the software.

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

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

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

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

Unix is a junk OS designed by a committee of PhDs.

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

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

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.

We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.

When in doubt, leave it out.

We are programmed; we are literally programmed genetically and then we are programmed environmentally and most people never break out of that programming.

We teachers make the road, others will make the journey.

We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.

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

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

When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.

Would you rather Test-First, or Debug-Later ?

Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

A code is like love, it has created with clear intentions at the beginning, but it can get complicated.

Also, don't forget that some of the most successful people in the world are self-taught programmers. Steve Wozniak, the founder of Apple, is a self-taught programmer. So is Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on NASA's Apollo Moon missions; David Karp, founder of Tumblr; Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter; and Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram.

Also, look for “floating alters.” These are not deliberately created parts of the system, but alters that were accidentally split off at the same time as others.

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.

And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer – it's likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language – putting a letter in the wrong column, say, or omitting a comma – and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks, like "ILLEGAL FORMAT," or "UNKNOWN PROBLEM," or, if the man who wrote the program was really feeling nasty that morning, "WHAT'S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN'T YOU READ?" Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attack the precocious abacus with an axe.

As soon as he said it was okay to do engineering, that really freed me up. My psychological block was really that I didn't want to start a company. Because I was just afraid. In business and politics, I wasn't going to be a real strong participant. I wasn't going to tell other people how to do things. I wasn't going to run things ever in my life. I was a non-political person and I was a very non-forceful person. It dated back to a lot of things that happened during the Vietnam War. But I just couldn't run a company.

As Lynn writes: "What angers me is the loss of control. At any moment someone could come to me, be dressed the right way and use the right code, and I no longer have free will. I will do anything that person requests. I hate them for that. Nothing else is as bad as known that I am always out of control; knowing that I am still a laboratory experiment, a puppet whose strings are hidden from ever but my handlers, and I don't yet know how to break free. p216