Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
Seymour Cray on virtual memory
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent van Gogh
One programmer can do in one day what two programmers can do in two.
Anonymous
Wherever there is modularity there is the potential for misunderstanding: Hiding information implies a need to check communication.
Alan J. Perlis
It takes an intelligent person to build something complex; it takes a genius to build something simple.
Anonymous
Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.
Alan J. Perlis
Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
Anonymous
Within a computer natural language is unnatural.
Alan J. Perlis
What you’ve described, “The bottleneck in writing code isn’t in the writing of the code, it’s in understanding and conceptualising what needs to be done,” is common to all highly abstract programming languages. Writing Haskell, for example, involves an hour of meditation followed by the emission of a fold expression.
Jonathan Feinberg
In computing, invariants are ephemeral.
Alan J. Perlis
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric Raymond