Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer…

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

— Larry Wall

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

— Tony Hoare

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

— Brian Kernighan

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

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

— Dennis Ritchie

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

— Gordon Bell

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware…

— Henry Petroski

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought.…

— Maurice Wilkes

The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.

— John Ousterhout

I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

— Maurice Wilkes

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

— Robert Coveyou

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

— William Wulf

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

— Niklaus Wirth

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

— David Gelernter