Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Rules for optimization: 1. Don't do it. 2. (for experts only) Don't do it yet.
Michael A Jackson
This is important, and a little hard to understand. English is useful because it's a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess (though in the nicest of possible ways).
Larry Wall
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
You start writing code, I'll go see what the customer wants
Anonymous
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."
Alan J. Perlis
Tell me what you need and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
Anonymous
I think there's a world market for about five computers.
Thomas J Watson Senior, 1945
If two people write exactly the same program, each should be put into microcode and then they certainly won't be the same.
Alan J. Perlis
It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all...
Larry Wall
Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.
Alan J. Perlis