Programming Quotes

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
— Edward V Berard

You can’t have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families.
— Jim McCarthy

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
— Keith Bostic

I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!
— Vidiu Platon.

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.
— Christopher Thompson

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
— Bill Gates

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
— Brian W. Kernighan

First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.
— George Carrette

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament]: ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage

A good programmer looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
— Anonymous

I love deadlines. Especially the whooshing sound they make as they pass by.
— Anonymous

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident.
That’s where we come in: We’re computer professionals, we cause accidents.
— Anonymous

Sometimes, things that should work, don’t. That’s worrying.
Sometimes things that shouldn’t work, do. That’s worringer.
— Notch

I’m a programmer. People seem to think I can fix their computer problems.
I guess they never wonder where those problems came from.
— Anonymous

There are only two hard problems in software development: naming, cache validation and being off-by-one.
— Leon Bambrick, found via Martin Fowler

There are only two hard problems in distributed systems:
(2.) Exactly-once delivery
(1.) Guaranteed order of messages
(2.) Exactly-once delivery
— Mathias Verraes, found via Martin Fowler

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.
— Joseph Weizenbaum

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke’s Three Laws

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
— Clifford Stoll

A problem well put is half solved.
— John Dewey

A programmer had a problem, so he decided to use threads.
Now two has, he problems.
— Anonymous

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
— Alan Kay

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
— Douglas Adams, “Last Chance To See”

How Standards Proliferate (See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)

Situation: There are 14 competing standards.
Geek: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases.
Fellow Geek: Yeah!
Soon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards.
(Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.)
— Randall Munroe, xkcd: Standards