Best Programmers Quotes

#1. The best designers and the best programmers aren't the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn't matter. That's where the real gains are made.

Jason Fried

#2. Even for the very best programmers ah, sometimes you'll see someone else's program or somebody will come along and they'll show you what can be done in a simpler way.

Bill Gates

#3. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.

Jamie Zawinski

#4. The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don't kid yourself about that, not even for a second.

Jose Ferreira

#5. The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.

Randall E. Stross

#6. The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails.

Michael Lewis

#7. In a recent survey, innovative people - from inventors to scientists, writers to programmers - were asked what techniques they used. Over 70% believed they got their best ideas by exploring areas they were not experts in

Scott Berkun

#8. Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.

Marissa Mayer

#9. The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

Seymour Cray

#10. Novice programmers don't yet have the skills to write simple code.

Sandi Metz

#11. It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers.

Larry Wall

#12. 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

#13. Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am it's because they were up all night.

Tom Van Vleck

#14. Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.

Richard P. Gabriel

#15. There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.

Virginia Postrel

#16. This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists ... by spending time alone practicing what they love.

Meg Cabot

#17. We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.

Jeff Atwood

#18. Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything.

Karl Lehenbauer

#19. Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

Tom Van Vleck

#20. It is a mistake to think that programmers wares are programs. Programmers have to produce trustworthy solutions and present it in the form of cogent arguments. Programs source code is just the accompanying material to which these arguments are to be applied to.

Edsger Dijkstra

#21. You can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable privilege to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And you cannot even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles on tap.

Ambrose Bierce

#22. It would be just like programmers to shorten 'the year 2000 problem' to 'Y2K'- exactly the kind of thinking that created this situation in the first place.

Stephen C. Meyer

#23. Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

Linus Torvalds

#24. The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

Alan Kay

#25. The best computer programmers are much better than novices at remembering the overall structure of programs because they understand better what they're intended to do and how.

Geoff Colvin

#26. Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.

Erik Naggum

#27. The best computer programmers never write a new program when they can use an old one for a new job.

Gerald M. Weinberg

#28. Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another's code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.

Guido Van Rossum

#29. Don't worry kids, you'll find work. After all, my machine will need strong chess player-programmers. You will be the first.

Mikhail Botvinnik

#30. Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Alan Perlis

#31. Programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap.

Karl Lehenbauer

#32. That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Larry Niven

#33. So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they've done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them. When the two did the estimating together, the results tended to fall in between.

Tom DeMarco

#34. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

Eric S. Raymond

#35. Now that I have the knowledge and I can speak to programmers better and I understand a lot more about what's possible and what's not possible, this will all help with the next game,

Shaun White

#36. In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes.

Temple Grandin

#37. As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be visually distinct.

Larry Wall

#38. I've always felt that people's ears are wider than programmers are ever wiling to give them credit for. It's always been very important to me that you not have to turn me off because your kids are in the back seat.

Donnie Simpson

#39. With the revolution around 1980 of PCs, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers - not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. It increased their capabilities.

Rodney Brooks

#40. Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Niklaus Wirth

#41. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

Linus Torvalds

#42. Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.

Rick Smolan

#43. Most kids are not dreaming of being programmers, scientists or engineers.

Will.i.am

#44. It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

Erik Naggum

#45. 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

#46. All programmers are optimists

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

#47. Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)

Brian Kernighan

#48. 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

#49. There are 2 to 3 million women programmers in the world. We need to see them more.

Megan Smith

#50. By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish.

Kurt Eichenwald