Programming Quotes

“You've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting.”
― Steve Jobs

“We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.”
― Alan J. Perlis

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

“Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.”
― Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software

“Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.”
― Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

“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

“Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant
to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap
bubble?”
― Alan J Perlis

“Don't gloss over a routine or piece of code involved in the bug because you "know" it works. Prove it. Prove it in this context, with this data, with these boundary conditions.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Architecture

“The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.”
― Steven S. Skiena, The Algorithm Design Manual

“What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?”
― James Alan Gardner, Ascending

“Take time to learn the closest thing that we have to a SUPERPOWER - Code”
― Sharen Eddings

“Do you know what you sound like?' said Mrs. Oliver. 'A computer. You know. You're programming yourself. That's what they call it, isn't it? I mean you're feeding all these things into yourself all day and then you're going to see what comes out.”
― Agatha Christie, Hallowe'en Party

“Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Erase outdated elements and rewrite programs: learn, unlearn and relearn to constantly adapt.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“What's in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“i am committed to push my branch to the master”
― Halgurd Hussein

“Virding's First Rule of Programming:
Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang.”
― Robert Virding

“Let the spell collapse. Something inside him relaxed, like a ghost limb untensed; a mind-trick. The spell, the brain's equivalent of some tiny, crude, looping sub-programme collapsed, simply ceased to be said.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“Engaging in 'vibe coding' as a non-technical founder is like surfing with an AI-powered board—catching waves effortlessly, but without understanding the ocean, you're one wipeout away from a crash.”
― Jason Hishmeh, The 6 Startup Stages: How Non-technical Founders Create Scalable, Profitable Companies

“Unfortunately, the most common metaphor for software development is building construction. [...] Well, software doesn’t quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening—it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost. You may move plantings relative to each other to take advantage of the interplay of light and shadow, wind and rain. Overgrown plants get split or pruned, and colors that clash may get moved to more aesthetically pleasing locations. You pull weeds, and you fertilize plantings that are in need of some extra help. You constantly monitor the health of the garden, and make adjustments (to the soil, the plants, the layout) as needed.

Business people are comfortable with the metaphor of building construction: it is more scientific than gardening, it’s repeatable, there’s a rigid reporting hierarchy for management, and so on. But we’re not building skyscrapers—we aren’t as constrained by the boundaries of physics and the real world.

The gardening metaphor is much closer to the realities of software development. Perhaps a certain routine has grown too large, or is trying to accomplish too much—it needs to be split into two. Things that don’t work out as planned need to be weeded or pruned.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Our software is fragile as well — if people built houses the way we write programs, the first woodpecker would wipe out civilization.”
― Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

“Even in the unending abyss that seals eternity at both ends,
if your function could compile to run on stray vacuum energy
and, given an input, it once returned some particular string,
it should, given that input, return that string again.
> [object Object]”
― Tim Woodruff, ServiceNow Development Handbook - 4th Edition: A compendium of ServiceNow "NOW" platform development and architecture pro-tips, guidelines, and best practices

“The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.”
― Geoffrey James, The Tao of Programming

“You can try to code their brain and body, but you cannot change a person's identity, personality, morals, integrity and stance in life.”
― Maria Karvouni, Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy

“Techniques that would be unthinkable in many textbook solutions can not only be good, but are simply required for a proper real-world working kernel. It's the small path that keeps the balance between these totally opposite faces of the kernel that makes the whole thing so interesting, challenging, and fun!”
― Wolfgang Mauerer, Professional Linux Kernel Architecture

“Time dilation occurs at relativistic speeds, in the presence of intense gravitational fields, and while waiting for a webpage to load.”
― Tim Woodruff, ServiceNow Development Handbook - 4th Edition: A compendium of ServiceNow "NOW" platform development and architecture pro-tips, guidelines, and best practices

“Fig. 1.06: Initializing a variable to a new object, using a constructor, and realizing I was 30 years old when I wrote the first edition of this book, oh my god I am so old where did the time and my youth go!?”
― Tim Woodruff, ServiceNow Development Handbook - 4th Edition: A compendium of ServiceNow "NOW" platform development and architecture pro-tips, guidelines, and best practices

“If you’re looking for inspiration, beauty, magic, love or wonder ... just look at the world around you - it’s brimming with stories waiting to be told, moments that take your breath away, and connections that remind us of what it means to be alive.”
― Kenwright, Pervasive WebGPU & WGSL: Graphics & Compute