Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Alan J. Perlis
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
Alan J. Perlis
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
E. W. Dijkstra
If you require information, do not free memory containing the information.
MSDN
If architects built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.
Gerald Weinberg
Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught not to. So it is with great programmers.
Alan J. Perlis
The computer is the ultimate polluter: its feces are indistinguish- able from the food it produces.
Alan J. Perlis
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan J. Perlis
... 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
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.
Gordon Bell