Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Alan J. Perlis
God is a hacker, not an engineer. You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
Francis Crick
The cybernetic exchange between man, computer and algorithm is like a game of musical chairs: The frantic search for balance always leaves one of the three standing ill at ease.
Alan J. Perlis
Lines of code are only worth counting, when time has come to delete them.
Anonymous
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.
Anonymous
Yes, sometimes Perl looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but to the seasoned Perl programmer, it looks like checksummed line noise with a mission in life.
Randal Schwartz
It is the user who should parameterize procedures, not their creators.
Alan J. Perlis
Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things.
McKenzie Wark in "A hacker Manifesto":02
I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprised me.
Matz