Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
If we'd asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses".
Henry Ford
This is important, and a little hard to understand. English is useful because it's a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess (though in the nicest of possible ways).
Larry Wall
You're never done, you just run out of time.
Anonymous
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Rick Osborne
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
A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
Bill Bryson
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
From SICP
Designing software in a team is like writing poetry in a committee meeting.
Joel Spolsky
You can't solve social problems through technical means.
Anonymous
In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
From SICP