Programming Quotes

“For all the robots who question their programming.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“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.”
― John Drury Clark, Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants

“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.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“The big optimizations come from refining the high-level design, not the individual routines.”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

“If they weren't nice to you when you were growing up, you'll probably be attracted to partners who aren't nice to you now.”
― Kate McGahan

“Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential.”
― Robert C. Martin, Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

“if you can write "hello world" you can change the world”
― Raghu Venkatesh

“You can program a computer to make mistakes, and you do it not by crossing wires, but by manipulating the 'language' you teach it to 'think' in.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“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.”
― Bartosz Milewski, Category Theory for Programmers

“We’re all optimists in our profession or we’d be forced to shoot ourselves. - Joshua Bloch”
― Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

“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.”
― Robin Sloan, Sourdough

“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,”
― Kernighan Brian W.

“Managers of programming projects aren’t always aware that certain programming
issues are matters of religion. If you’re a manager and you try to require compliance
with certain programming practices, you’re inviting your programmers’ ire. Here’s a
list of religious issues:
■ Programming language
■ Indentation style
■ Placing of braces
■ Choice of IDE
■ Commenting style
■ Efficiency vs. readability tradeoffs
■ Choice of methodology—for example, Scrum vs. Extreme Programming vs. evolutionary
delivery
■ Programming utilities
■ Naming conventions
■ Use of gotos
■ Use of global variables
■ Measurements, especially productivity measures such as lines of code per day”
― Steve McConnell, Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

“Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.”
― Donald Knuth

“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.”
― Joseph Rain, The Unfinished Book About Who We Are

“[On identifying talented programmers] It’s just enthusiasm. You ask them what’s the most interesting program they worked on. And then you get them to describe it and its algorithms and what’s going on. If they can’t withstand my questioning on their program, then they’re not good. I’m asking them to describe something they’ve done that they’ve spent blood on. I’ve never met anybody who really did spend blood on something who wasn’t eager to describe what they’ve done and how they did it and why. I let them pick the subject. I don’t pick the subject, so I’m the amateur and they’re the professional in this subject. If they can’t stand an amateur asking them questions about their profession, then they don’t belong. - Ken Thompson”
― Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

“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.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“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.”
― Marijn Haverbeke, Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction

“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.”
― Cory Althoff, The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally

“Most improved things can be improved.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Neal Ford, Functional Thinking: Paradigm Over Syntax

“Introduction to Python Programming is an outcome of our sincere effort geared towards students community.”
― Gowrishankar S.

“Second-guessing a decision made by a programming-language designer is the first step on the road to becoming one.”
― Robert Sedgewick, Kevin Wayne

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

“The goal of diversity shouldn't instigate divisive activity. Beauty brand communications shouldn't angle to create perceptive complexity, rhetorical and associative programming touts beauty as skin deep (all skin inclusive) keep it simple. It seems as though the advertising trend for marketers this 2017 year, is to risk the social media lightning rodded scorn of public outrage. As a virtual publicist, it seems like I am speaking more about the necessity of crisis communication planning, more than standard communication for brands as a matter of good business operations & reputation management.”
― Tracey Bond

“AI is the transformer of civilization.”
― Toba Beta

“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”
― Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

“Last year for his birthday he asked for a programming book called “C Plus Plus”, whatever that means.”
― Matthew Sullivan

“Reality really relies on authoritatively regulating
Your absolute attention”
― Andrew Edward Lucier, Awakenigma Allegory Anomalous

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.”
― Jamie Zawinski