Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
Alan Kay
Like punning, programming is a play on words.
Alan J. Perlis
The best things are simple, but finding these simple things is not simple.
Anonymous
Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to a system.
Fernando J. Corbató
In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt.
Blair P. Houghton
I’ve finally learned what ‘upward compatible’ means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.
Dennie van Tassel
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
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Hofstadter's Law
... 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
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Albert Einstein