Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.
Anonymous
C is to programming as Latin is to literature.
Anonymous
Real Programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Anonymous
It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on.
Alan J. Perlis
The proof of a system's value is its existence.
Alan J. Perlis
All programming is an exercise in caching.
Terje Mathisen
In software, the most beautiful code, the most beautiful functions, and the most beautiful programs are sometimes not there at all.
Jon Bentley
A program without a loop and a structured variable isn't worth writing.
Alan J. Perlis
[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