301 Quotes About Programming

I'm a programmer. I like programming. And the best way I've found to have a positive impact on code is to write it.

The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.

So if an algorithm is an idealized recipe, a program is the detailed set of instructions for a cooking robot preparing a month of meals for an army while under enemy attack,

The usual goal in the typing monkeys thought experiment is the production of the complete works of Shakespeare. Having a spell checker and a grammar checker in the loop would drastically increase the odds. The analog of a type checker would go even further by making sure that, once Romeo is declared a human being, he doesn’t sprout leaves or trap photons in his powerful gravitational field.

The main thing I want to show in this chapter is that there is no magic involved in building your own language. I’ve often felt that some human inventions were so immensely clever and complicated that I’d never be able to understand them. But with a little reading and tinkering, such things often turn out to be quite mundane.

The problem with a completely new programming paradigm isn’t learning a new lan‐guage. After all, everyone reading this has learned numerous computer languages—language syntax is merely details. The tricky part is learning to think in a different way.

This approach is refreshing because most of the programming books I've read are drier than a camel's fart.

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.

The really good programmers spend a lot of time programming. I haven’t seen very good programmers who don’t spend a lot of time programming. If I don’t program for two or three days, I need to do it. And you get better at it—you get quicker at it. The side effect of writing all this other stuff is that when you get to doing ordinary problems, you can do them very quickly. - Joe Armstrong