Programmers Quotes - Page 7

• Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time

  Eric S. Raymond

  Machines, Preference, Expensive

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.22, Addison-Wesley Professional

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.

  Kent Beck

  People, Tools, Masters

  Twitter post from Nov 08, 2013

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.

  Robert W. Floyd

  Wise, Struggle, Past

  11 Copy quote

• When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.

  Patricia Cornwell

  College, Two, Funeral

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. … Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants speed.

  Erik Naggum

  Thinking, Errors, Etc

  4 Copy quote

• Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to.

  Sherry Turkle

  Real, Color, Law

  Sherry Turkle (2005). “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit”, p.69, MIT Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...when fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.

  Fred Brooks

  Running, Strong, Creativity

  4 Copy quote

• The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Clever, Humility, Skulls

  "The humble programmer" by Edsger Dijkstra in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 15, Issue 10 (pp. 859-866), dl.acm.org. October 1972.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• GOTO, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.

  Raymond Simard

  Complaining, Tools, Computer

  4 Copy quote

• In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

  Linus Torvalds

  Talking, People, Hackers

  4 Copy quote

• Most kids are not dreaming of being programmers, scientists or engineers.

  will.i.am

  Dream, Kids, Scientist

  46 Copy quote

• At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.

  Michael Crichton

  Jobs, Writing, Young

  Michael Crichton (2002). “Prey”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Learning, Mastery, Tongue

  Edsger W. Dijkstra (2012). “Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective”, p.130, Springer Science & Business Media

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

  Donald Knuth

  Machines, Algorithms, Way

  23 Copy quote

• Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

  Tom Van Vleck

  Real, Writing, Cobol

  4 Copy quote

• Teaming up with the scientists, researchers and computer programmers at Intel to collaborate and co-develop new ways to communicate, create, inform and entertain is going to be amazing.

  will.i.am

  Way, Computer, Scientist

  4 Copy quote

• When you think about it, there's no way to input things into a computer. It's all... the holes only go out, right? Like you can plug a keyboard or a mouse in but that's a trick because the computer thinks the inputs are outputs. That's a programmer trick, basically magic. The key to the future is to make holes that go in too.

  Mark Zuckerberg

  Thinking, Keys, Magic

  4 Copy quote

• There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

  Joel Spolsky

  Writing, Thinking, Law

  Joel Spolsky (2004). “Joel on Software”, p.184, Apress

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Fighting, Dark

  6 Copy quote

• Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)

  Brian Kernighan

  Mean, Firsts, Dimensions

  Brian W. Kernighan, P. J. Plauger (1978). “The Elements of Programming Style”, Computing McGraw-Hill

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

  Paul Vixie

  Plato, Real, Errors

  6 Copy quote

• Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

  John Carmack

  Self, Mojave, Desert

  John Carmack's plan of Quake 3 Arena Project, www.bluesnews.com. May 15, 2000.

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Mistake, Coders, Debugging

  Lecture titled "The Design and Use of the EDSAC" delivered by Maurice Wilkes at the Digital Computer Museum, tcm.computerhistory.org. September 23, 1979.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.

  Pharrell Williams

  Learning, Views, Issues

  7 Copy quote

• I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.

  Chris Parnell

  Thinking, Ideas, Apples

  "Chris Parnell on Farrah Fawcett and being mistaken for Chris Kattan". Interview with Marah Eakin, tv.avclub.com. September 11, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source