Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
E. W. Dijkstra
As Will Rogers would have said, "There is no such thing as a free variable."
Alan J. Perlis
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
There are only 3 numbers of interest to a computer scientist: 1, 0 and infinity.
Anonymous
In software systems, it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
Alan J. Perlis
Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Nick-louse Veert'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nickel's Worth.' This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.
Niklaus Wirth
If it doesn't have to work, we can do it real quick.
Watts Humphrey
C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung.
Anonymous
All programs have at least one bug remaining and can be optimized by one byte. Thus, by mathematical induction, all programs can be reduced to one byte. And it won't work.
Anonymous
Use four digits. A new millenium is coming.
Jon Bentley (1976)