Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Tell me what you need and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
Anonymous
Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.
Cory Doctorow
Testing like the TSA.
David Heinemeier Hansson on testing too much
Good programmers never write what they can steal or borrow.
Jeff Atwood
The most important computer is the one that rages in our skulls and ever seeks that satisfactory external emulator. The standarization of real computers would be a disaster - and so it probably won't happen.
Alan J. Perlis
The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
John Carmack on software patents
The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working.
John Ousterhout
You can have a negative percent chance of succeeding in a task. For example, if you have a -5% chance of succeeding, not only will you fail every time you make an attempt, you will also fail 1 in 20 times that you don't even try.
Anonymous
If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.
John Carmack
The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams