Non Programmers Quotes

#1. Most non-programmers don't think of plaintext like that. To them, text files feel like filling in tax forms for an angry robotic auditor that yells at them if they forget a single semicolon.

Robert Nystrom

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

Seymour Cray

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Megan Smith

#6. 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

#7. Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Niklaus Wirth

#8. 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

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

Marissa Mayer

#10. All programmers are optimists

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

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

Sandi Metz

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

Larry Wall

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Richard P. Gabriel

#16. 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

#17. Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes

John Naughton

#18. Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

Tom Van Vleck

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Will.i.am

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Larry Wall

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Eric S. Raymond

#31. 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

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

Larry Niven

#33. Programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap.

Karl Lehenbauer

#34. 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