Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. – Martin Fowler, author and international speaker on software development
Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.– Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering
If it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.-Grace Murray Hopper, creator of COBOL
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.- Ken Thompson , creator of B,C, Unix
At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they’re designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler. -Dennis Ritchie, creator of C
Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs. -John W. Backus, FORTRAN developer
“How to test?” is a question that cannot be answered in general. “When to test?” however, does have a general answer: as early and as often as possible.’ -Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++
Invariably, you’ll find that if the language is any good, your users are going to take it to places where you never thought it would be taken. – Guido Van Rossum, creator of Python
If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me – that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML.– Tim Berners Lee, creator of the World Wide Web
I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.– Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi. – Larry Wall, creator of Perl
Every configuration file becomes a programming language, so you might as well think that way.- James Gosling, creator of Java
The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system– Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder
With a lot of programs today, you’re not only saying what you want the program to do, you are saying in painful detail how you want it done. The way we get to take advantage of all of the progress in CPUs and memory is offloading some of that ‘how to’ to the infrastructure. – Anders Hejlsberg, creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
I really don’t like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code. Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP
Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy. -Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal
Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, “My language is perfect. It can do everything.” But it’s just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language – how we feel while programming. -Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of Ruby
Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.– Anonymous