Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
Alan J. Perlis
Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.
Anonymous
You can't solve social problems through technical means.
Anonymous
Like wine, the mastery of programming matures with time. But, unlike wine, it gets sweeter in the process.
Lawrence Mucheka
What you’ve described, “The bottleneck in writing code isn’t in the writing of the code, it’s in understanding and conceptualising what needs to be done,” is common to all highly abstract programming languages. Writing Haskell, for example, involves an hour of meditation followed by the emission of a fold expression.
Jonathan Feinberg
We have the mini and the micro computer. In what semantic niche would the pico computer fall?
Alan J. Perlis
A programmer started to cuss
Anonymous
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;
If two people write exactly the same program, each should be put into microcode and then they certainly won't be the same.
Alan J. Perlis
It is not the computer's fault that Maxwell's equations are not adequate to design the electric motor.
Alan J. Perlis
Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly.
Steve Yegge