Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Software is either testable or detestable.
Anonymous
Working software is the primary measure of progress.
Agile Manifesto
Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.
Anonymous
What happens in the mind of a fine artist is nothing different from that going on in the mind of an expert coder. Both see and thrive in the quintessential nature of patterns.
Lawrence Mucheka
It is easier to port a shell than a shell script.
Larry Wall
... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names — otherwise you would be selling nothing — like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering" (the latter three being known as IPSE, OO and BPR, respectively).
Edsger W. Dijkstra
APL, I believe, can only be learned by writing one-liners–only by seeing in a sense, what you can compress into a line.
Alan J Perlis
Processes and methodologies can make good servants but are poor masters.
Mark Dowd, John McDonald & Justin Schuh
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Nathaniel S Borenstein
The eleventh commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.
Alan J. Perlis