Best 218 quotes in «programming quotes» category

Optimization hinders evolution.

Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad.

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven

Plan to throw one (implementation) away; you will, anyhow.

Perfect reusable components are not obtained at the first shot.

Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor.

Programming in Go is like being young again (but more productive!).

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

Programming in Basic causes brain damage.

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

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

Software sucks because users demand it to.

Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.

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

Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

[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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

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

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

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

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

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

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

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

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

Television has certainly become a wasteland of quality programming.

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

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

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

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.

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

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