Programming Funny Quotes - Page 2

• No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.

  Mark Gibbs

  Technology, Numbers, People

  "The myth of the digital lifestyle" by Mark Gibbs, www.networkworld.com. January 9, 2006.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

  Fred Brooks

  Comfort, Arbitrary, Amusing

  "No Silver Bullet". Book by Fred Brooks, 1986.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

  William Wulf

  Names, Stupidity, Sin

  "A Case Against the GOTO," Proceedings of the 25th National ACM Conference, (pp. 791-797), August 1972.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

  Fred Brooks

  Computer, Projects, Programming

  "The Mythical Man-Month," Datamation, Dec. 1974

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.

  Tony Hoare

  Roots, Evil, Simplicity

  18 Copy quote

• Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

  Fred Brooks

  Baby, People, Nine

  27 Copy quote

• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

  Donald Knuth

  Funny Inspirational, Bugs, Computer

  Memorandum to Peter van Emde Boas, 29 Mar. 1977

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

  Seymour Cray

  Technology, Too Late, Coders

  54 Copy quote

• The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.

  John Ousterhout

  Inspirational, Transition, Improvement

  47 Copy quote
• 

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

  Bill Gates

  Success, Trust, Leadership

  23 Copy quote

• I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social.

  Woody Allen

  Witty, Humorous, Geek

  27 Copy quote

• Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

  Brian Kernighan

  Technology, Essence, Simplicity

  Brian W. Kernighan (1981). “Software Tools in Pascal”, Addison-Wesley Professional

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am rarely happier than when spending 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

  Hands, Tasks, Computer

  Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine (2011). “Last Chance to See”, p.49, Ballantine Books

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most of the 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

  Fun, Work, Program

  "First Monday Interview with Linus Torvalds: What motivates free software developers?". Interview with Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, firstmonday.org. March 2, 1998.

  140 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

  Larry Wall

  Funny, Technology, Three

  58 Copy quote

• As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when 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, Technology, Coders

  "The Design and Use of the EDSAC". Lecture delivered at the Digital Computer Museum, September 23, 1979.

  50 Copy quote

  Show source

• Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

  Niklaus Wirth

  Programming, Faster, Software

  "Excel HSC Softw Design&Devel + Cards SG". Book by Geoff Lancaster, 2001.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

  Tony Hoare

  Witty, Humorous, Simple

  "The Emperor's Old Clothes". Communications of the ACM 24 (2), (pp. 75-83), February 1981.

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.

  Keith Braithwaite

  Mistake, Coders, Curious

  45 Copy quote

• The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.

  Gordon Bell

  Engineering, Programming, Software

  45 Copy quote

• A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

  Dennis Ritchie

  Simplicity, Language, Computer

  44 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.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source