Programming Quotes

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Giving up an addiction means re-programming that part of your brain that makes you restless and unhappy if a desire is not realized.

If you think something is impossible, don't disturb the person who is doing it!

Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.

A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.

When in doubt, use brute force.

Testing is not the point. The point is about responsibility.

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.

Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.

The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.

Don't document bad code - rewrite it.

If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.

It's never too late to change the programming imprinted in childhood, carried in our genes or derived from previous lives; the solution is mindfulness in the present moment.

Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small.

Successful weight loss takes programming, not willpower.

Never hesitate to ask a lesser person.

Software sucks because users demand it to.

Years of cultural programming have taught us to love some animals while eating others, when in all reality, all animals are sentient beings with the capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally.

You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.

Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.

The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.

If you don’t take responsibility for programming yourself, then someone else will.

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

Programming is usually taught by examples.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The universe is already programmed to give each of us a year of happiness. Our challenge lies in programming ourselves to receive it.

The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it's true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.

A good threat is worth a thousand tests.

Pay-TV companies that built their businesses on the backs of local and network broadcast signals should pay a fair price for access to that high-value programming.

It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading.

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