Programming quotes:

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Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming. -- John Carmack
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. -- Philip Greenspun
Programming is all about numbers. -- Shigeru Miyamoto
'Programming' is a four-letter word. -- Craig Bruce
Programming is an explanatory activity. -- Roman Harper
Programming' is a four-letter word. -- Craig Bruce
Programming in Basic causes brain damage. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Programming is usually taught by examples. -- Niklaus Wirth
Programming is legitimate and necessary academic endeavour. -- Donald Knuth
Programming is much much harder than doing mathematics. -- Doron Zeilberger
Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul. -- John Carmack
Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft. -- Richard Stallman
Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick -- Charles Petzold
Programming in Go is like being young again (but more productive!). -- Anneli Jaatteenmaki
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning. -- Nicholas Negroponte
Learning. It's really the primary reason behind everything I do. Programming, entrepreneuring, writing. -- Derek Sivers
Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better. -- Derek Sivers
Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small. -- Richard E. Pattis
Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books. -- Alan Turing
Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals. -- Henry Spencer
Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable -- Per Brinch Hansen
Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do. -- Donald Knuth
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied. -- Stewart Brand
Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. -- Karl Lehenbauer
Programming is similar to a game of golf. The point is not getting the ball in the hole but how many strokes it takes. -- Hayley Mills
Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program. -- Linus Torvalds
If you think you're a really good programmer... read Knuth's Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing. -- Bill Gates
Programming will aid a person in developing their mind and will aid their meditation. I find that people who have pursued programming are doing much better in their meditation. -- Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell
Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do. -- Brian Kernighan
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. -- Rick Cook
Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming. -- Bill Gates
One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase. -- Martin Fowler
Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule. -- Damian Conway
Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt. -- Charles Simonyi
Programming is the act of installing internal, pre-established reactions to external stimuli so that a person will automatically react in a predetermined manner to things like an auditory, visual or tactile signal or perform a specific set of actions according to a date and/or time. -- Alison Miller
Talk is cheap. Show me the code. -- Linus Torvalds
A prudent question is one-half of wisdom. -- Francis Bacon
The best is the enemy of the good. -- Voltaire
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code. -- Ken Thompson
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there. -- Gordon Bell
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. -- Alan Perlis
Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. -- John von Neumann
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -- Bill Gates
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -- Confucius
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald Knuth
I invented the term 'Object-Oriented', and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- Alan Kay
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. -- Carl Sagan
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. -- Red Adair
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. -- Edsger Dijkstra
When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop. -- Alan Perlis
The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. -- Alan Perlis
Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. -- Niklaus Wirth
When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. -- Donald Knuth
Successful weight loss takes programming, not willpower. -- Phil McGraw
It's not going to be too much longer before Xbox Live produces programming. -- Peter Jackson
However, when Java is promoted as the sole programming language, its flaws and limitations become serious. -- Bjarne Stroustrup
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it. -- Donald Knuth
You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity. -- John Romero
By combining elements such as hypnosis, magic, neurolinguistic programming and psychology, I can make it appear that I can hack into people's brains. -- Keith Barry
Computing should be taught as a rigorous - but fun - discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn't have to be boring. -- Geoff Mulgan
I'm perfectly happy complaining, because it's cathartic, and I'm perfectly happy arguing with people on the Internet because arguing is my favourite pastime - not programming. -- Linus Torvalds
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone. -- Marissa Mayer
I graduated from college with a 3.92 GPA with a degree in computer programming and a BFA in fine arts and animation. My first job was painting a mural in the Grimaldi's in Queens. -- JWoww
When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children's programming. -- Jim Henson
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. -- Charles R. Swindoll
We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java. -- Larry Ellison
When I'm 18, I can finally order that paid programming stuff on TV. Like it always says, 'Must be 18 or older to call,' so I'll be able to call! I can finally buy some blenders from the TV. -- Austin Mahone
When it comes to storytelling, not taking risks is riskier than swinging for the fences. I have very simple ambitions when it comes to taking risks in storytelling and programming. I try very hard to avoid the expected. -- David Nevins
The most important precedents deal with the whole idea of symbolic programming - the notion of setting up symbolic expressions that can represent anything one wants, and then having functions that operate on both their structure and content. -- Stephen Wolfram
I love my music, so I want to produce, write, and serve my music. I've had to learn about EQ frequencies and programming and space and clutter and how to be a better piano or bass player - everything. -- FKA twigs
There was a time when idealistic folksingers such as myself believed that Reality TV was a programming vogue that would peak and recede, leaving only its hardiest show-offs. Instead, it has metastasized like toxic mold, filling every nook and opening new crannies. -- James Wolcott
When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song. -- Martin Gore
I love cities, and I love city governments in particular. But in politics it would have taken me 8 years from implementing a policy before I would get to see the feedback. With programming I could model the same policies and see the impact immediately. Technology is a far more efficient way to test. -- Jack Dorsey
I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society. -- Damien Rice
We live in a world where finding fault in others seems to be the favorite blood sport. It has long been the basis of political campaign strategy. It is the theme of much television programming across the world. It sells newspapers. Whenever we meet anyone, our first, almost unconscious reaction may be to look for imperfections. -- Henry B. Eyring
My programming language was solder. -- Terry Pratchett
I don't like programming. It's tedious. -- Rasmus Lerdorf
Perl programming is an *empirical* science! -- Larry Wall
There was something amazingly enticing about programming. -- Vint Cerf
There was something amazingly enticing about programming. -- Vint Cerf
The greatest single programming language ever designed -- Alan Kay
JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language. -- Douglas Crockford
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. -- Brian Kernighan
It's against my programming to impersonate a deity. -- Lawrence Kasdan
I skip through the programming to watch the commercials. -- Mel Karmazin
I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems -- Rasmus Lerdorf
It's just programming" "No. It's because I love him -- Scott Westerfeld
A data structure is just a stupid programming language. -- Bill Gosper
After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field. -- W. Richard Stevens
I find languages that support just one programming paradigm constraining -- Bjarne Stroustrup
Authentic programming that shows the outside world garners authentic interest. -- Constance Wu
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. -- Tony Hoare
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity. -- Edsger Dijkstra
There were no PCs when I started programming on computers. -- Dave Winer
BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing. -- Seymour Papert
I also love Mole, the unsung hero of reality programming. -- Kathy Griffin
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress. -- Alan Perlis
I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed -- Martin Fowler
Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment. -- Kent Beck
The whole cable-TV original programming just changed the nature of television. -- Anson Mount
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming. -- Alan Perlis
You know, I've never accidentally drilled a hole in myself while programming. -- Karl Lehenbauer
Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter what the circumstances. -- Linus Torvalds
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. -- Bjarne Stroustrup
If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets. -- Shawn Fanning
All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code. -- Dave Thomas
The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code, -- Douglas McIlroy
If you don't take responsibility for programming yourself, then someone else will. -- Paul McKenna
There is nothing in the programming field more despicable than an undocumented program -- Edward Yourdon
Most media leaders are liberal and much of their programming reflects anti-Christian sentiment. -- Tim LaHaye
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises. -- Ken Thompson
It's been quite a 'pattern interrupt', a massive change of the old programming. -- Kenny Loggins
By becoming mindful of our cultural programming, we can step out of it. -- Christiane Northrup
I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer... -- Douglas Adams
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