Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Code reuse is the Holy Grail of Software Engineering.
Douglas Crockford
If it works, leave it alone — there's no need to understand it. If it fails, try to fix it — there's no time to understand it.
Bill Pfeifer
The whole HTML validation exercise is questionable, but validating as XHTML is flat-out masochism. Only recommended for those that enjoy pain. Or programmers. I can't always tell the difference.
Jeff Atwood
Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
Alan J. Perlis
An ideal world is left as an exercise to the reader.
From Paul Graham's "On Lisp"
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
Alan J. Perlis
The eleventh commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.
Alan J. Perlis
We are on the verge: Today our program proved Fermat's next-to-last theorem.
Alan J. Perlis
Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.
David Kelly
If you can build it, your users can break it.
Anonymous