C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.

It's amazing when the best player in the world tries to stop you and tries to guard you.

— Dennis Schroder

It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trival details of a program - such as where its bugs…

— Robert D Keppel

The camel has evolved to be relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good. Neither has Perl.

— Larry Wall

A Perl program is correct if it gets the job done before your boss fires you.

— Larry Wall

I have a pretty major problem with a language where one of the most common variables has the name $_

— Brian H. Hook

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

— Niklaus Wirth

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

— Alan Kay

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.

— Richard E. Pattis

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you…

— Brian Kernighan

As we said in the preface to the first edition, C "wears well as one's experience with it grows." With a decade more experience,…

— Brian Kernighan

You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, because they don't know which end is up.

— Tony Hoare

It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.

— Steve McConnell

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

— Stan Kelly-Bootle

The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.

— Mark Pearce

Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.

— Donald Knuth