Top 42 Best Programmer Quotes
#1. And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.
Brian Behlendorf
#2. If this code works, it was written by Paul DiLascia. If not, I don't know who wrote it ..I'll be laughing when I'm old and and all my programmer friends have gone alexic from staring at too many tiny pixels
Paul Dilascia
#3. The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.
Seymour Cray
#4. The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.
Bjarne Stroustrup
#5. To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accomodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.
Ellen Ullman
#6. If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine.
Joel Spolsky
#7. The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures.
Fred Brooks
#8. Probably the arrogance of the community that surrounds it. Knowing Lisp certainly doesn't make one a better person, nor even necessarily a better programmer.
Anonymous
#9. I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.
Kent Beck
#10. Programming is usually taught by examples.
Waseem Latif
#11. I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.
Chris Parnell
#12. A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Doug Linder
#13. Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
Marvin Minsky
#14. I know you are thinking 'logically' like a programmer because you got used to doing so for many years now, but this is more related to the heart. I don't think you'd understand that.
Sriharsha Sripada
#15. The difference between a bad programmer and a good programmer is understanding. That is, bad programmers don't understand what they are doing and good programmers do. - Max Kanat-Alexander
Steve Fenton
#16. You don't have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#17. The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.
Edsger Dijkstra
#18. Are you allowing your own expectations to hinder you from freely expressing yourself? Is your idea of the right way keeping you from your best way? Are you too distracted to show up? Are you living like a programmer instead of a poet?
Emily P. Freeman
#19. Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.
Graham Moore
#20. 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 I fished out listings of their operating systems.
Bill Gates
#21. There is no one unique method to learn programming, but there are many best ways to deal with it. The one word that is frequently heard whenever it is asked about the best way to learn and be a good programmer is: 'Practice.
Santosh Avvannavar
#22. If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.
Clive Thompson
#24. Your identity should not be fully defined by what you do, by being a manager, a wife, a mother of children or a computer programmer
Sunday Adelaja
#25. Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.
Jessica Livingston
#26. Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
Donald Knuth
#27. The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
Donald Knuth
#28. The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Edsger Dijkstra
#29. The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple
John Brown
#30. I remember on Deus Ex there was one programmer - Alex Durand, a guy who still works for us - he decided he was going to get through the game without ever using a weapon. I would never think to do that. And that's fine.
Warren Spector
#31. The world is changing, and I believe that, if I want to stay employed as a programmer, I'm going to have to change with it.
Kent Beck
#32. It would've been amazing [to work as programmer]. You're good at numbers, you're good with people, you like to wear shorts in the summertime.
Jimmy Fallon
#33. It is, therefore, possible to extend a partially specified interpretation to a complete interpretation, without loss of verifiability, [ ... ] This fact offers the possibility of automatic verification of programs, the programmer merely tagging entrances and one edge in each innermost loop.
Robert W. Floyd
#34. The programmer who refuses to keep exploring will surely stagnate, forget his joy, lose the will to program (and become a manager).
Marijn Haverbeke
#35. God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.
Orson Scott Card
#36. When fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor.
Fred Brooks
#37. I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn't going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I've ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn't want to do whatever he did.
J. Cole
#38. The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.
Fernando J. Corbato
#39. A very good senior programmer (who might get paid $200,000) gets paid about the same as a great programmer, who delivers $5 million worth of value for the same price. That's enough of a difference to build an entire company's profit around. Do it with ten programmers and you're rich.
Seth Godin
#40. We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
#42. I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.
Rasmus Lerdorf
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