Programming Quotes

“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”
― Alan Kay

“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

“You should imagine variables as tentacles, rather than boxes. They do not contain values; they grasp them—two variables can refer to the same value.”
― Marijn Haverbeke, Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

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

“Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“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

“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.

“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

“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

“Then he began writing the software that would get the microprocessor to display images on the screen. Because he could not afford to pay for computer time, he wrote the code by hand. After a couple of months he was ready to test it. "I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen." It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. "It was the first time in history," Wozniak later said, "anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer's screen right in front of them.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“The vision teller tells the vision to unguarded minds' of prey. The programmed.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“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

“Why was Simpson called "OJ" except in some kind of branding or headlinese that said, "Look, this guy is sweet, wholseome, and nourishing (and 'Orenthal' is just too fancy)? You can have him for breakfast." (And "Sweetness" and "Sweet" are nicknames often given to black men.) Is "OJ" that far away from Jell-O? Wasn't that extended advertising campaign a way of saying you can trust our pudding because Bill Cosby likes it—sweet, wholesome, and pretty?”
― David Thomson, Television: A Biography

“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