Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
Robert Firth
Debugging is like farting - it's not so bad when it's your own code.
Anonymous
A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.
Alan J. Perlis
Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection. But that usually will create another problem.
David Wheeler
Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language for communicating phenomena of interest. Programmers from different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could use one that doesn't require them to carry a blackboard on their ponies.
Alan J. Perlis
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
Anonymous
Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement.
Fred Brooks
An ideal world is left as an exercise to the reader.
From Paul Graham's "On Lisp"
I’ve finally learned what ‘upward compatible’ means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.
Dennie van Tassel
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
From SICP