Programming Quotes

“No matter which field of work you want to go in, it is of great importance to learn at least one programming language.”
― Ram Ray

“If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.”
― Donald Knuth

“You can Change Your Organization or Change Your Organization”
― Martin Fowler

“What I love about both programming and music is that they enable you to build incredibly creative, complex, and beneficial things seemingly from thin air -- no additional materials required, just your brain and a keyboard in front of you.”
― Peter Borum

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
― Jamie Zawinski

“For years, coders have been programming computers so that they perform repetitive tasks for us. Now they automate our repetitive thoughts.”
― Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

“No night of drinking or drugs or sex could ever compare to a long evening of productive hacking.”
― Lynn Voedisch, Soundrise

“Programs should always have the form of paragraphs of comments that describe the intention of the program followed by paragraphs of code that implement that intention. All of the formatting should be designed to make readers as able as possible to read the code easily; the compiler doesn’t care. In particular, follow conventions of mathematics and your native language, not those you found in some random language manual. Write the comments first and then write the code, not the other way around. If you don’t know what you want to achieve and why, any code you write is, by definition, incorrect.”
― Charles Wetherell, Etudes for Programmers

“Tests shouldn’t verify units of code. Instead they should verify units of behavior: something that is meaningful for the problem domain and ideally something that a business person can recognize as useful. The number of classes it takes to implement such a unit of behavior is irrelevant. The unit could span across multiple classes or only one class, or even take up just a tiny method. [...] A test should tell a story about the problem your code helps to share, and this story should be cohesive and meaningful to a non-programmer.”
― Vladimir Khorikov, Unit Testing: Principles, Practices, and Patterns

“The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.”
― Donald Knuth

“The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
― Donald Knuth

“Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.”
― Anonymous

“Code is read more than it is written.”
― Daniel Roy Greenfeld, Audrey Roy Greenfeld

“An individual block of code takes moments to write, minutes or hours to debug, and can last forever without being touched again. It’s when you or someone else visits code written yesterday or ten years ago that having code written in a clear, consistent style becomes extremely useful. Understandable code frees mental bandwidth from having to puzzle out inconsistencies, making it easier to maintain and enhance projects of all sizes.”
― Daniel Roy Greenfeld, Audrey Roy Greenfeld

“Programming in different languages is like composing pieces in different keys, particularly if you work at the keyboard. If you have learned or written pieces in many keys, each key will have its own special emotional aura.”
― Douglas Hofstadter

“STOP APPLYING PATCHES.
RECODE YOURSELF NOW.

24 Dec National Mathematics Day”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think”
― Steve Jobs

“Stop pushing people into web development as if it is the only true career path. Instead, push people into computer science, programming, coding, etc. There is so much competition because everyone is doing it, you just create a lot of demoralized and disgruntled people. There is more to programming than web development.”
― Olawale Daniel

“Coding is not just code, that is a live thing to serve everyone!”
― Ming Song

“There are many terrible mistakes to make in program design, and you should go ahead and make them so that you understand them. A sense of what a good program looks like is developed in practice, not learned from a list of rules.”
― Marijn Haverbeke, Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

“What I love about both programming and music is that they enable you to build incredibly creative, complex, and beneficial things seemingly from thin air no additional materials required, just your brain and a keyboard in front of you.
Programming and music also both allow for a deep, single-minded immersion in the creative process. They require you to be deeply focused and in the moment for everything to work well, and I find that state of flow to be immensely satisfying.”
― Peter Borum

“I think that two of the most important things in business are communication and the ability to inspire confidence in your employees, investors, and end-users.
How does computer science tie in?
Being able to translate strategic objectives into language that both the business team and the engineering team can understand is really helpful to foster good communication. Being able to speak with confidence on the details of both business and engineering considerations also helps to inspire confidence.”
― Peter Borum

“Memory has been discussed here as though it consisted mainly of a body of data. But experts possess skills as well as knowledge. They acquire not only the ability to recognize situations or to provide information about them; they also acquire powerful special skills for dealing with situations as they encounter them. Physicians prescribe and operate as well as diagnose.

The boundary between knowledge and skill is subtle. For example, when we write a computer program in any language except machine language, we are really not writing down processes but data structures. These data structures are then interpreted or compiled into processes that is, into machine-language instructions that the computer can understand and execute. Nevertheless for most purposes it is convenient for us simply to ignore the translation step and to treat the computer programs in higher-level languages as representing processes.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“It's not a bug; it's an undocumented feature.”
― Anonymous

“One Loop to rule them all, One Loop to find them,
One Loop to bring them all and in liveness bind them.”
― Luciano Ramalho, Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming

“In the end, if this book is anything, it is really just a good old-fashioned programming book.
While a scientific topic may seed a chapter (Newtonian physics, cellular growth, evolution) or
the results might inspire an artistic project, the content itself will always boil down to the code
implementation, with a particular focus on object-oriented programming.”
― Daniel Shiffman, The Nature of Code

“We've also talked about the somewhat unusual processing model that makes life challenging for programmers from the world of procedural languages (a.k.a. Earth).”
― Doug Tidwell, XSLT: Mastering XML Transformations

“But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried
Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ‘It is invol-
untary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory?
You have not controlled mine!’
O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on
the dial.
‘On the contrary,’ he said, ‘YOU have not controlled it.
That is what has brought you here. You are here because
you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would
not make the act of submission which is the price of san-
ity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only
the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe
that reality is something objective, external, existing in its
own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-
evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you
see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same
thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not ex-
ternal. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and
in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party,
which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds
to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except
by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact
that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-
destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself
before you can become sane.”
― George Orwell

“Web development is difficult, only then it is fun to do. You just have to set your standards. If it were to be easy, would anyone do it?”
― Olawale Daniel

“I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows and Microsoft Visual C++. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screens full of windows and toolbars and dialogues, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and and unexplainable outcomes, they stood agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to not knowing. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall 'productivity' of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was not the handiwork of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of 'hard.”
― Ellen Ullman, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology