Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.
Gordon Bell
If our customers wanted a product that worked that way, tell them to purchase a product that works that way.
Anonymous
I know it doesn't sound like a big effort, but programmers are really, really lazy, and they like to minimize motion. They'd use feeder tubes if the Health Department would let them.
Steve Yegge
We kid ourselves if we think that the ratio of procedure to data in an active data-base system can be made arbitrarily small or even kept small.
Alan J. Perlis
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.
Grady Booch
Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.
Alan J. Perlis
In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
From SICP
I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
Tony (C.A.R.) Hoare
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Edsger Dijkstra