Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Anonymous
What happens in the mind of a fine artist is nothing different from that going on in the mind of an expert coder. Both see and thrive in the quintessential nature of patterns.
Lawrence Mucheka
[The common definition of estimate is] "An estimate is the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true" . . . Accepting this definition leads irrevocably toward a method called what's-the-earliest- date-by-which-you-can't-prove-you-won't-be- finished estimating.
Tom DeMarco
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
Alan Kay
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Clark's law
We kid ourselves if we think that the ratio of procedure to data in an active data-base system can be made arbitrarily small or even kept small.
Alan J. Perlis
The structure of software systems tend to reflect the structure of the organization that produce them.
Douglas Crocford
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
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity only gets in the way.
Alan J. Perlis
Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction: One, it's completely impossible. Two, it's possible, but it's not worth doing. Three, I said it was a good idea all along.
Arthur C. Clarke