Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?
Alan J. Perlis
Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.
Alan J. Perlis
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's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.
Steve McConnell
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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
FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.
Ken Thompson
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
How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Alan J. Perlis