Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
What I cannot build, I do not understand.
Richard Feynman
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
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
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
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!
Mark Twain
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
Alan J. Perlis
C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
Steve Taylor
Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ?
Richard A. O'Keefe
Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.
Alan J. Perlis