Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering" (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively).
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects.
David Kelly
No code is faster than no code.
Anonymous
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.
Anonymous
There are only 3 numbers of interest to a computer scientist: 1, 0 and infinity.
Anonymous
In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
From SICP
Starting a startup is hard, but having a 9 to 5 job is hard too, and in some ways a worse kind of hard.
Paul Graham
All programs have at least one bug remaining and can be optimized by one byte. Thus, by mathematical induction, all programs can be reduced to one byte. And it won't work.
Anonymous
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