Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
Alan J. Perlis
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
Dave Parnas
I (...) am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Douglas Adams
Designing software in a team is like writing poetry in a committee meeting.
Joel Spolsky
There will always be things we wish to say in our programs that in all known languages can only be said poorly.
Alan J. Perlis
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.
Alan J. Perlis
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
Alan J. Perlis
What is the difference between a Turing machine and the modern computer? It's the same as that between Hillary's ascent of Everest and the establishment of a Hilton hotel on its peak.
Alan J. Perlis
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.
Richard Pattis
If a program manipulates a large amount of data, it does so in a small number of ways.
Alan J. Perlis