Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.
Anonymous
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
Alan J. Perlis
... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
Robert Firth
Code is everything I thought poetry was, back when we were in school. Clean, expressive, urgent, all-encompassing. Fourteen lines can open up to fill the available universe.
Richard Powers
Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Alan J. Perlis
A logician trying to explain logic to a programmer is like a cat trying to explain to a fish what it's like to get wet.
Anonymous
Tell me what you need and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
Anonymous
An ideal world is left as an exercise to the reader.
From Paul Graham's "On Lisp"
One programmer can do in one day what two programmers can do in two.
Anonymous