301 Quotes About Programming

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.

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

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

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.

Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.