Top 100 Programmer Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Edsger Dijkstra
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The programmer who refuses to keep exploring will surely stagnate, forget his joy, lose the will to program (and become a manager).
Marijn Haverbeke
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.
Alan Perlis
#17. Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule.
Damian Conway
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Doug Linder
#22. The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.
Seymour Cray
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
Marvin Minsky
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. You don't have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#36. 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
#37. Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
John Carmack
#38. The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.
Eric Allman
#39. I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age 15.
Andy Weir
#40. I understand that it isn't your fault your programmer had so little imagination. The
Marissa Meyer
#41. The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.
Rick Cook
#42. By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.
Donald Knuth
#43. 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
#44. He didn't exactly have the "programmer" look to him, if you know what I mean. He'd be the programmer's boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays.
John Scalzi
#45. When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket.
Brenda Laurel
#46. Man is programmed to find the programmer.
Kedar Joshi
#47. The idea was that while one person wrote code, the other programmer would massage his or her shoulders; then they would switch.
Nick Bilton
#48. Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
Charles Stross
#49. When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.
Patricia Cornwell
#50. I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
Kent Beck
#51. When you have a programmer-founded company it often gets really techy, if you have a producer or a business-person, it all really sets the flavor of the company, just the priorities and the way you deal with everything.
Tim Schafer
#52. Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry Wall
#53. I don't like the feeling, but I've got to say that a little fear makes me a more focused, more responsible programmer.
Kent Beck
#54. I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.
Fred Brooks
#55. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.
David Parnas
#56. I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.
G. Willow Wilson
#57. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a CEO. I'm a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.
Markus Persson
#58. An Essay from Andy Weir: How Science Made Me a Writer I'm a nerd. Okay, a lot of people say that these days. But I really am. I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age fifteen.
Andy Weir
#59. Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.
Joel Spolsky
#60. When the superior programmer refrains from coding, his force is felt for a thousand miles.
Eric S. Raymond
#61. A program can only do what it's programmed to do, to the letter of the law. Unfortunately, what's written doesn't always coincide with what the programmer intended the program to do.
Anonymous
#62. If you're a musician or actor, you know that if you're successful, some level of fame goes along with that. You're prepared. But how often does that happen to a programmer?
Shawn Fanning
#63. And no, I'm not a walking C++ dictionary. I do not keep every technical detail in my head at all times. If I did that, I would be a much poorer programmer. I do keep the main points straight in my head most of the time, and I do know where to find the details when I need them.
Bjarne Stroustrup
#64. A good quant must be a mixture, too - part trader, part salesperson, part programmer, and part mathematician.
Emanuel Derman
#65. It has to become second nature, for a programmer, to notice when a concept is begging to be abstracted into a new word.
Marijn Haverbeke
#66. You are reading this book for two reasons. First, you are a programmer. Second, you want to be a better programmer. Good. We need better programmers.
Robert C. Martin
#67. I'm not a computer person at all. I only know how to turn them on. I'm not a programmer. I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag.
Rick Smolan
#68. Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing.
James Gleick
#69. Once a programmer had a problem. He thought he could solve it with a regular expression. Now he had two problems.
Jamie Zawinski
#70. The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme.
Kevin Mitnick
#71. 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
#72. You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
Alan Perlis
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Testing proves a programmer's failure. Debugging is the programmer's vindication.
Boris Beizer
#78. 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
#79. An excellent mother knows she has the beautiful life, and she is a big time programmer.
Jaachynma N.E. Agu
#80. 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
#81. This works, but it's hard to imagine that anybody except a hard-core functional programmer would consider it pretty.
Anonymous
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric Raymond
#86. 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
#87. What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?
James Alan Gardner
#88. The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.
Larry Wall
#89. To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
Charles Petzold
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. Settle yourself down for an apocryphal bedtime story. A programmer's parable, if you will ... .
Anonymous
#94. From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.
Pharrell Williams
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.
Kevin Systrom
#98. Larry Wall's classic Programming Perl described the three programmer's virtues: hubris, laziness, and impatience.
C.J.S. Hayward
#99. Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
Eric S. Raymond
#100. 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
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