Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
You can have a negative percent chance of succeeding in a task. For example, if you have a -5% chance of succeeding, not only will you fail every time you make an attempt, you will also fail 1 in 20 times that you don't even try.
Anonymous
It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only communication coin we can count on.
Alan J. Perlis
The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
Anonymous
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
Alan J. Perlis
All programmers are optimists.
Frederick Brooks
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
Alan J. Perlis
In programming, everything we do is a special case of something more general -- and often we know it too quickly.
Alan J. Perlis
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Isaac Asimov
The debate rages on: is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?
Alan J. Perlis
When we understand knowledge-based systems, it will be as before -- except our fingertips will have been singed.
Alan J. Perlis