Programming Quotes

653 quotes by 371 authors

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions. — Edsger Dijkstra
I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff… — Tom Van Vleck
Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution… — Edsger Dijkstra
Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad. — Rob Pike
A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate. — Rob Pike
Trying to express implicit and fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the meaning, it destroys it. — Clay Shirky
Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20. — Dennis Ritchie
I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested… — David Parnas
With diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly. — Tom Duff
Comparing to another activity is useful if it helps you formulate questions, it's dangerous when you use it to justify answers. — Martin Fowler
Unformed people delight in the gaudy and in novelty. Cooked people delight in the ordinary. — Erik Naggum
Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does. — Lawrence Bossidy
Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge… — Chris Sacca
â€¦ what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names â€” otherwise you would be selling… — Edsger Dijkstra
When in doubt, leave it out. — Joshua Bloch
As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow. — Douglas McIlroy
A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal. — Bram Cohen
In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it… — Edsger Dijkstra
The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want. — Bram Cohen
Things which any idiot could write usually have the quality of having been written by an idiot. — Bram Cohen

Who Wrote These Programming Quotes

371 authors contributed a total of 653 Programming Quotes, led by these top contributors: