Programming Quotes

“Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.”
― Donald Ervin Knuth

“Demoscene has its own programming philosophy based on perfectionism.”
― Vladimir Kameñar, Demoscene, el Arte Digital

“Programming is learned
by writing programs.”
― Brian Kernighan

“When he really, really likes a girl, he creates a font and names it after her.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Programming, when stripped of all its circumstantial irrelevancies, boils down to no more and no less than very effective thinking so as to avoid unmastered complexity, to very vigorous separation of your many different concerns.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“The programming wasn’t done surgically or electrically, or by any other sort of neurological intrusiveness. It was done socially, with nothing but talk, talk, talk.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Timequake

“Programming is the immediate act of producing code. Software engineering is the set of policies, practices, and tools that are necessary to make that code useful for as long as it needs to be used and allowing collaboration across a team.”
― Titus Winters, Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

“Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Confusion is part of programming.”
― Felienne Hermans, The Programmer's Brain

“Loving what you do, doing what you love”
― Randall Hyde, Write Great Code, Volume 3: Engineering Software

“Internet and privacy are antithesis of each other.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Insan: When The World is Family

“I used to do machine language programming in the lights on the front panel of a computer; now I do higher-dimensional type theory. It's a little bit crazy.”
― Robert Harper

“In our online world there is no way for a regular civilian to keep their phone uninfected. And that includes everybody except skilled and resourceful programmers.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction

“To a nation of grandparents nostalgic for a time when everyone listened to Toscanini on the radio, tired of having to watch people on TV win money for bungee jumping and eating goat rectums, Jeopardy! is sweetly cerebral relief piped in straight from the Eisenhower era, a time capsule from ana age before America dumbed down.”
― Ken Jennings, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“The only thing worse than not knowing why some code breaks is not knowing why it worked in the first place! It's the classic "house of cards" mentality: "it works, but I'm not sure why, so nobody touch it!" You may have heard, "Hell is other people" (Sartre), and the programmer meme twist, "Hell is other people's code."
I believe truly: "Hell is not understanding my own code.”
― Kyle Simpson, You Don't Know JS: Async & Performance

“Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine; the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning.
Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence.
And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming.
This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities.
It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities.
In fact, it is the (virtual) machine which is speaking you, the machine which is thinking you.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

“Does a pile even count as an organizational scheme? – It does! Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it isn’t a valid organizational scheme.”
― Amy Wibowo

“If you buy a 486 with a SuperVGA, you’ll get performance that knocks your socks off, especially if you run Windows.”
― Michael Abrash, Graphics Programming Black Book

“A 1964 study illustrated how status considerations could distort people's perceptions of the level of skill that was involved in various programming jobs. The study asked experienced computer personnel to distribute a list of programming tasks among a hierarchy of jobs–systems analyst, senior programmer, and programmer. The author found that "the higher the level of the job, the more job skills were included"–even if some of those tasks normally were performed by workers in the lower-status jobs. Higher-status workers were simply assumed to have a monopoly on skilled tasks, even by people who were familiar with the field and should have known better. We should not be surprised to find that employers, who often had no personal knowledge of programming, fell back on social categories when evaluating potential workers.”
― Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

“Si todo ha sido programado, nada puede obedecer a la casualidad.”
― J.J. Benítez

“Another detrimental effect of undervaluing people skills was that in some cases, programmers were rewarded more for raw code production than for meeting the user's needs. Marge Devaney, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950's, recalled sex differences in how programmers judged their performance. Asked if she had ever experienced gender bias on the job, sh replied that discrimination was difficult to prove, adding, "With things like computing, it's very hard to judge who's doing the best. Is it better to produce a program quickly and have it full of bugs that the users keep hitting, and so it doesn't work? Or is it better to produce it more slowly and have it so it works?...I do know some of the men believed in the first way: 'Throw it together and let the user debug it!'" This critique is echoed by women today who find their male peers rewarded for averting disasters through heroic last-minute efforts, while women's efforts at preventing such problems through careful work and communication with users go unrecognized. As a female software engineer complained in 2007, "Why don't we just build the system right in the first place? Women are much better at preventive medicine. A Superman mentality is not necessarily productive; it's just an easy fit for the men in the sector.”
― Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

“One of the easiest ways to get noticed or hired as a junior developer in the tech industry is by documenting everything you are learning. Build great projects, but don't forget to document your journey along the way.”
― Olawale Daniel

“Since large programs grow from small ones, it is crucial that we develop an arsenal of standard program structures of whose correctness we have become sure—we call them idioms—and learn to combine them into larger structures using organizational techniques of proven value.”
― Alan J. Perlis, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“In a technologically advanced world, the most powerful nation is not the one with nuclear power, but the one with coding power.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“Humanizing AI (The Sonnet)

You can code tasks,
But not consciousness.
You can code phony feelings,
But definitely not sentience.
Nobody can bring a machine to life,
No matter how complex you make it.
But once a machine is complex enough,
It might develop awareness by accident.
So let us focus on humanizing AI,
By removing biases from algorithms,
Rather than dehumanizing AI,
By aiming for a future without humans.
Rich kids with rich dreams make good movies.
Be human first and use AI to equalize communities.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“You don’t actually need to worry too much about the
difference between const and final constants. As a general rule, try const first, and if the compiler complains, then make it final. The benefit of using const is it gives the compiler the freedom to make internal optimizations to the code before compiling it.”
― Jonathan Sande & Matt Galloway, Dart Apprentice

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“That’s what’s cool about working with computers. They don’t argue, they remember everything, and they don’t drink all your beer".”
― Paul Leary

“Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.”
― Sam Ewing

“A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen”
― Paul Graham