Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
In software systems, it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
Alan J. Perlis
Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at a time!
Fred Brooks
Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
Alan J. Perlis
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Alan J. Perlis
The C Programming Language — A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language.
Anonymous
If we're supposed to work in Hex, why have we only got A fingers?
Anonymous
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
Anonymous
Think of all the psychic energy expended in seeking a fundamental distinction between "algorithm" and "program".
Alan J. Perlis
80 percent of my problems are simple logic errors. 80 percent of the remaining problems are pointer errors. The remaining problems are hard.
Mark Donner, IBM Watson Research Center
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?
Alan J. Perlis