Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.
Alan J. Perlis
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
C trades a slap on the wrist at compile time for a knife in the back at run time.
Anonymous
It is not the computer's fault that Maxwell's equations are not adequate to design the electric motor.
Alan J. Perlis
Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.
Mosher's Law of Software Engineering
[The common definition of estimate is] "An estimate is the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true" . . .
Tom DeMarco
Accepting this definition leads irrevocably toward a method called what's-the-earliest- date-by-which-you-can't-prove-you-won't-be- finished estimating.
Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written, and another for which it wasn't.
Alan J. Perlis
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read.
Pliny the Elder
The difference between something that can go wrong and something that can’t possibly go wrong is that when something that can’t possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams
Perspective is worth 80 I.Q. points
Alan Kay