Best 218 quotes in «programming quotes» category

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

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

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.

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

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 unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When in doubt, leave it out.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever, In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things. Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

Artificial intelligence is nowhere near attaining actual sentience or awareness. And without awareness it’s simply a mechanical device, which may pretend to show emotions and sentience, if it is programmed to do so, and thus it may be able to fool the humans as being alive, but in its own internal circuitry, it’d simply be following its preprogrammed tasks through the flowchart of an algorithm.

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.

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 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

Being able to extend jQuery, whether by adding your own functions, CSS selectors or full- blown plugins, makes you a much stronger and smarter developer.

Coding like poetry should be short and concise.

Beware of "don'ts", "thou shalt" and the like. These are signals of programming attempts at your brain.

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

C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge.

Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.

First solve the problem. Then, write the code.

Every programmer is an author.

If someone can change your mind, he has won you over without raising his hand against you. This is the future of warfare.

Happiness should be a function without any parameters.