Programming Quotes

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.
--John Ruskin

Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case.
--Francis Glassborow

Software and cathedrals are much the same. First we build them, then we pray.
--Sam Redwine

I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
--Tony Hoare

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
--Donald E. Knuth

Developers are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame, frequently with the same result.
--Neal Ford

Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.
--Alan Turing

Don't be (too) clever. My point was to discourage overly clever code because 'clever code' is hard to write, easy to get wrong, harder to maintain, and often no faster than simpler alternatives because it can be hard to optimize.
--Bjarne Stroustrup

The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself.
--Alan Cooper

Mathematicians stand on each others' shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others' toes.
--Richard Hamming

The code you write makes you a programmer. The code you delete makes you a good one. The code you don't have to write makes you a great one.
--Mario Fusco

The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony Number 9.
-Erwin Dieterich

If you can get today’s work done today, but you do it in such a way that you can’t possibly get tomorrow’s work done tomorrow, then you lose.
--Martin Fowler

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
--Nathaniel S. Borenstein

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
--Emo Philips

The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.
--Gene Spafford

There is an art to knowing where things should be checked and making sure that the program fails fast if you make a mistake. That kind of choosing is part of the art of simplification.
--Ward Cunningham

It is very hard to predict, especially the future.
--Niels Bohr (attributed to)

Telling a programmer there's already a library to do X is like telling a songwriter there's already a song about love.
--Pete Cordell

Never spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it.
--Zhuowei Zhang

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
--Donald Knuth

Being a young programmer today must be awful—you can choose 20 different programming languages, dozens of framework and operating systemsand you're paralyzed by choice. There was no paralysis of choice then. You just start doing it because the decision as to which language and things is just made—there's no thinking about what you should do, you just go and do it.
--Joe Armstrong

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment.
--Kent Beck

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
Martin Fowler

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
--Ralph Johnson