Good Programming Quotes

#1. I think there's a lot of really good programming on television. What I've noticed, through the years of being a professional writer, is the watering down process of story. You have to market to the masses and not offend anybody.

Lauren Iungerich

#2. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

#3. Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.

Hal Abelson

#4. A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Alan Perlis

#5. Computer programming is pretty much guaranteed income. I'm good at it, and I like it.

Andy Weir

#6. One of her secret fantasies had been that, as a girl who could code, she would work in the one place where a geeky fat girl could get dates. It had not been entirely untrue. But as someone had pointed out to her in school, although the odds are good, the goods are odd.

Maureen F. McHugh

#7. 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

#8. Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.

Bertrand Meyer

#9. Good programmers know what's beautiful and bad ones don't.

David Gelernter

#10. Some automatic responses are good - they're skills, and we need them for life and labor. But the tendency to accumulate programming tends to have a life of its own - or more accurately, to steal the life that belongs to us.

John Shirley

#11. Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.

Douglas Coupland

#12. MSNBC got some very good people. They've got a good-looking set. All They're first-class. Somewhere along the way, they kind of lost their identity as a news channel, and they started doing a lot of other sort of magazine-type programming.

Brit Hume

#13. Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it ... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems.

John Carmack

#14. Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

John Carmack

#15. When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or - heaven forbid - meetings, I felt bad.

Eric Ries

#16. One of the things I've been trying to do is look for simpler or rules underpinning good or bad design. I think one of the most valuable rules is avoid duplication. "Once and only once" is the Extreme Programming phrase.

Martin Fowler

#17. AMC is a fantastic network that does diverse programming, and does it at a really good level and of great quality.

Jamie Bell

#18. Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.

Douglas Crockford

#19. 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

#20. I was not in a good space in my life, emotionally particularly, so I needed to do something to recharge my batteries emotionally and musically. I took a break and I learnt software and programming a little bit, and that's how I designed my live machine, which I've been using for years.

Jamie Lidell

#21. If you think you're a really good programmer ... read Knuth's Art of Computer Programming ... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing.

Bill Gates

#22. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.

Billy Graham

#23. I notice small things. I'm a "detail" guy, that's why I'm good at programming.

Holly Peterson

#24. I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Douglas Adams

#25. Good software, like wine, takes time.

Joel Spolsky

#26. There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.

Jon Erickson

#27. Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make all fields final unless they need to be mutable.

Brian Goetz

#28. I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another.

Socrates

#29. A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal.

Bram Cohen

#30. The science and engineering of programming just isn't good enough to produce flawless software, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. The

Bruce Schneier

#31. Sometimes abstraction and encapsulation are at odds with performance - although not nearly as often as many developers believe - but it is always a good practice first to make your code right, and then make it fast.

Brian Goetz

#32. ...I'm not saying simple code takes less time to write. You'd think it would since you end up with less total code, but a good solution isn't an accretion of code, it's a distillation of it.

Robert Nystrom

#33. 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

#34. When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

Martin Gore

#35. Follow your dreams wherever they lead you and pay for those dreams with good jobs in software programming and computer design!

Frederick Lenz

#36. The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

Donald Knuth

#37. If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger.

Robert C. Martin

#38. The system is only as good as the person programming it. If you don't have the follow-through, your system is useless. And by the way, it's that way in parenting; it's that way in marriages.

Jamie Lee Curtis

#39. Even though most people won't be directly involved with programming, everyone is affected by computers, so an educated person should have a good understanding of how computer hardware, software, and networks operate.

Brian Kernighan