"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
— Harold Abelson (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Second Edition)

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
— Charles Babbage

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
— Rich Cook

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."
— Why The Lucky Stiff

"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers."
— Larry Niven

"When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass."
— Larry Wall

"Life isn't fair, and programming is even less fair."
— Wil Shipley

"We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features."
— Douglas Crockford (JavaScript: The Good Parts)

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

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