Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
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.
Rich Cook
Java is a DSL to transform big Xml documents into long exception stack traces.
Scott Bellware
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Bill Gates
In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general -- and often we know it too quickly.
Alan J. Perlis
C is quirky, flawed and an enormous success.
Dennis Ritchie
Some programmers, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use floating point arithmetic." Now they have 1.999999999997 problems.
Tom Scott
... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering" (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively).
Edsger W. Dijkstra
The use of a program to prove the 4-color theorem will not change mathematics - it merely demonstrates that the theorem, a challenge for a century, is probably not important to mathematics.
Alan J. Perlis
Selecting a project due date before the requirements are properly gathered is like selecting which corner you want to paint yourself into, while simultaneously negating the doorway as a viable option.
Chris Ames
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
Alan J. Perlis