Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Hardware is the part of a system you can kick. Software is the one you can only curse at.
Anonymous
Users are a terrible thing. Systems would be infinitely more stable without them.
Michael T. Nygard.
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 software systems, it is often the early bird that makes the worm.
Alan J. Perlis
You can write software expecting the hardware to be perfect, unfortunately hardware is not perfect and you have to fix it in code.
W. Giraud
[The common definition of estimate is] "An estimate is the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true" . . .
Tom DeMarco
Accepting this definition leads irrevocably toward a method called what's-the-earliest- date-by-which-you-can't-prove-you-won't-be- finished estimating.
Good programmers learn more from "That's not what I expected!" than from getting it right the first time.
Anonymous
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
Alan J. Perlis
If you can build it, your users can break it.
Anonymous
Don't fix it if it ain't broke presupposes that you can't improve something that works reasonably well already. If the world's inventors had believed this, we'd still be driving Model A Fords and using outhouses.
H. W. Kenton