Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Think of compilation as cooking. Dynamic typing means the steak is juicy and still a little red, like red meat is supposed to be. Static typing means you burnt it to a crisp.
Erik Naggum
How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven.
Charles Petzold
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
Alan J. Perlis
It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
Larry Wall
Don't fix it if it ain't broke presupposes that you can't improve something that works reasonably well already. If the world's inventors had believed this, we'd still be driving Model A Fords and using outhouses.
H. W. Kenton
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan J. Perlis
Computers don't introduce order anywhere as much as they expose opportunities.
Alan J. Perlis
It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
E. W. Dijkstra
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy