Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.
Alan J. Perlis
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
I (...) am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Douglas Adams
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.
Alan J. Perlis
What you’ve described, “The bottleneck in writing code isn’t in the writing of the code, it’s in understanding and conceptualising what needs to be done,” is common to all highly abstract programming languages. Writing Haskell, for example, involves an hour of meditation followed by the emission of a fold expression.
Jonathan Feinberg
Ever spend a little time reading comp.lang.c++ ? That's really the best place to learn about the number of C++ users looking for a better language.
R. William Beckwith
Code reuse is the Holy Grail of Software Engineering.
Douglas Crockford
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Isaac Asimov
Going from programming in Pascal to programming in C, is like learning to write in Morse code.
J.P. Candusso