Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine.
Joel Spolsky
It is not a language's weakness but its strengths that control the gradient of its change: Alas, a language never escapes its embryonic sac.
Alan J. Perlis
If you get it free, it is worthless. If you pay for it, it has value. If you build it yourself, it is priceless.
Raj More
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric Raymond
[The common definition of estimate is] "An estimate is the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true" . . . 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.
Tom DeMarco
80 percent of my problems are simple logic errors. 80 percent of the remaining problems are pointer errors. The remaining problems are hard.
Mark Donner, IBM Watson Research Center
We kid ourselves if we think that the ratio of procedure to data in an active data-base system can be made arbitrarily small or even kept small.
Alan J. Perlis
It makes no sense to try to do what we can. We must do what is necessary.
Winston Churchill
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?
Alan J. Perlis
My assertion that we can do better with computer languages is a persistent belief and fond hope, but you'll note I don't actually claim to be either rational or right. Except when it's convenient.
Larry Wall