Top 100 Programmer Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.
Michael Lewis
#4. I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."
Michael Loceff
#5. The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
Larry Wall
#6. Unix is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate the simplicity..
Dennis Ritchie
#7. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
#8. At fifty years old and many years into her second career, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#9. My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.
Robert W. Floyd
#10. I've been a DJ, janitor, ditch digger, waitress, computer instructor, programmer, mechanic, web developer, clerk, manager, marketing director, tour guide and dorm manager, among other things.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#11. I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.
Yukihiro Matsumoto
#12. 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
#13. Talking to a programmer type about the trading business was a bit like talking to the house plumber at work in the basement about the card game the Mafia don was running upstairs.
Michael Lewis
#14. As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.
Douglas McIlroy
#15. I didn't realize how good I was with technology until I met my parents ... my dad told me "You're good; you should be a computer programmer." I said, "You're bad ... you should be a caveman."
Mike Birbiglia
#16. It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!
Robert C. Martin
#17. Do not be alarmed by the minor inconsistencies in the syntax. They are meant to heighten your level of attention and thereby make you a better programmer.
David Geary
#18. 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
#19. Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster - but not worse.
Martha Stewart
#20. Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
#21. The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.
Bram Cohen
#22. If there's one thing you should know about dealing with programmers is do not distract them. Wait for them to come to you. Just put your request in the queue. Never expect a programmer to do something immediately.
Anonymous
#23. I'm still a really shitty programmer, but I know enough to hack a prototype together.
Dennis Crowley
#25. 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
#26. By trade, I am a software programmer, so I never really had any experience with movies before. I started out with 'Paranormal Activity.'
Oren Peli
#27. I'm always thinking about songs, I'm thinking of life maybe a little bit more lyrically than a computer programmer or someone like that.
Jon Foreman
#28. Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer).
Larry Tesler
#29. 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
#30. We could talk, act, and dress funny. We were excused for socially inappropriate behavior: 'Oh, he's a programmer'. It was all because we knew this technology stuff that other people found completely mystifying.
Kent Beck
#31. Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer.
Jon Postel
#32. The Vedic viewpoint presents a type of linguistic realism in which reality is the 'text' which is being processed by the observer. Reality can also be modified by adding text to it similar to how a programmer programs a computer by inputting a computer program.
Ashish Dalela
#33. At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job.
Michael Crichton
#34. Colossal Cave (also known as Adventure - not to be confused with the Atari VCS game of the same name) was developed by assembly-language programmer William Crowther
Anonymous
#35. In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
Linus Torvalds
#36. But Ruby, my language of choice since NewBagel, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry.
Robin Sloan
#37. 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
#38. Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.
John Carmack
#39. My first job was as a programmer. So I feel like I'm familiar with the information technology sector and the information technology culture.
Gene Luen Yang
#40. It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.
Bill Budge
#41. Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
Eric S. Raymond
#42. Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming.
John Carmack
#43. Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
Eric S. Raymond
#44. Larry Wall's classic Programming Perl described the three programmer's virtues: hubris, laziness, and impatience.
C.J.S. Hayward
#45. It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.
Kevin Systrom
#46. The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.
Fernando J. Corbato
#47. C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge.
Herbert Schildt
#48. From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.
Pharrell Williams
#49. Settle yourself down for an apocryphal bedtime story. A programmer's parable, if you will ... .
Anonymous
#50. From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.
Yukihiro Matsumoto
#52. Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.
Edsger Dijkstra
#53. To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
Charles Petzold
#54. The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.
Larry Wall
#55. What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
James Alan Gardner
#56. In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor
Tom DeMarco
#57. Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric Raymond
#58. In 1962, a typo by a NASA programmer resulted in Mariner 1 being sent into the ocean rather than its intended destination, Venus. The cause was a missed hyphen.
Drummond Moir
#59. The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong.
Verity Stob
#60. It is a real service to humanity and the world to be a good programmer, particularly if you design great products. You make is easier for everybody, everybody has less headaches.
Frederick Lenz
#61. This works, but it's hard to imagine that anybody except a hard-core functional programmer would consider it pretty.
Anonymous
#62. The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
Joseph Weizenbaum
#63. An excellent mother knows she has the beautiful life, and she is a big time programmer.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
#64. In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.
G. Willow Wilson
#65. Testing proves a programmer's failure. Debugging is the programmer's vindication.
Boris Beizer
#66. Did that high-and-mighty attitude of yours come attached to you when you were spawned?!
Was it a bug your programmer couldn't fix?!
CLAMP
#67. 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
#68. Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
Richard Stallman
#69. It's better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.
Steve McConnell
#70. You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
Alan Perlis
#72. You don't have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
Marvin Minsky
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.
Seymour Cray
#86. A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Doug Linder
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages,
Walter Isaacson
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Edsger Dijkstra
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
#99. 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
#100. 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
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