Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub- systems and so on ad infinitum - which is why we're always starting over.
Alan J. Perlis
Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points
Alan Kay
I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprised me.
Matz
Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged about forever.
Dan Kaminsky
Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Alan J. Perlis
Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
Alan J. Perlis
Don't fix it if it ain't broke presupposes that you can't improve something that works reasonably well already. If the world's inventors had believed this, we'd still be driving Model A Fords and using outhouses.
H. W. Kenton
Rules for optimization:
Michael A Jackson
1. Don't do it.
2. (for experts only) Don't do it yet.
Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed.
Bob Gray