Quotes About Programmers

#1. 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

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

Alan Perlis

#3. Programmers are expensive. Hardware is cheap.

Karl Lehenbauer

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

Larry Niven

#5. 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

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

Eric S. Raymond

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Larry Wall

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Will.i.am

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. All programmers are optimists

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Megan Smith

#22. 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

#23. Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Niklaus Wirth

#24. 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

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

Marissa Mayer

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

Seymour Cray

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

Sandi Metz

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

Larry Wall

#29. 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

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

Richard P. Gabriel

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

Jeff Atwood

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit

Bjarne Stroustrup

#41. Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.

Orson Scott Card

#42. Our society expects that everyone should learn to write, even though very few become professional writers. Similarly, I think that everyone should learn how to program, even though very few will become professional programmers.

Mitchel Resnick

#43. 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

#44. Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well.

Mitchell Baker

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. The distance between the people who made the games and the people playing them wasn't that big. It was the spirit of independence. The programmers were a lot like you.

Jeff Minter

#48. 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

#49. Teaming up with the scientists, researchers and computer programmers at Intel to collaborate and co-develop new ways to communicate, create, inform and entertain is going to be amazing.

Will.i.am

#50. Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.

Robert Anton Wilson

#51. Linux provides programmers with everything they need: libraries, compilers, and debugging/development tools. These features are included in all standard Linux versions.

Andrew Johansen

#52. Programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time.

Steve McConnell

#53. In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

#54. I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Elizabeth Warren

#55. The system metaphor is a story that everyone
customers, programmers, and managers
can tell about how the system works.

Kent Beck

#56. 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

#57. Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Martin Fowler

#58. Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.

Jamais Cascio

#59. The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You're going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.

Gabe Newell

#60. Programmers are like magicians who fool everyone into thinking they are perfect and never wrong, but it's all an act. They make mistakes all the time.

Zed A. Shaw

#61. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Linus Torvalds

#62. One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

John Carmack

#63. Tests are stories we tell the next generation of programmers on a project.

Roy Osherove

#64. An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#65. Too many managers and executives try to reduce programming to a low-level assembly-line activity. That's inefficient, wasteful, costly in the long run, and inhumane to programmers.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#66. I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

Walter Mosley

#67. Great programmers learn how to program their tools, not just use them.

Steve Yegge

#68. There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them.

Dave Parnas

#69. Programmers must avoid leaving false clues that obscure the meaning of code.

Robert C. Martin

#70. I found out that most programmers don't like to test their software as intensely as I do.

Kent Beck

#71. The days of holding the audience captive to watching television at times that programmers tell them they have to watch it are coming to an end. It's a new world, where the viewer and fan wants to watch whatever they want to watch, whenever they want to watch it.

Joseph McGinty Nichol

#72. Advertising revenue available for all programmers, all broadcasters is not enough to create quality programming, and subscription revenues are very, very minimal which come to all programmers.

Subhash Chandra

#73. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.

Richard Stallman

#74. To initiate the debugger, all you have to do is import the pdb built-in module and run its set_trace function. You'll often see this done in a single line so programmers can comment it out with a single # character.

Brett Slatkin

#75. Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality.

Jessica Livingston

#76. Good programmers stay open minded to that even though there is no obvious way to improve what they've done they ... they keep looking and they listen to what other people have to say.

Bill Gates

#77. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Paul Graham

#78. Saying that programmers should just accomplish twice as much doesn't work. They can gain skills and effectiveness, but they cannot get more done on demand. More time at the desk does not equal increased productivity for creative work.

Kent Beck

#79. Programmers and marketing people know how to get into your subconscious - they spend millions of dollars researching colors, shapes, designs, symbols, that affect your preferences, and they can make you feel warm, trusting, like buying. They can manipulate you.

Richard Hatch

#80. I may be biased, but I tend to find a much lower tendency among female programmers to be dishonest about their skills, and thus do not say they know C++ when they are smart enough to realize that that would be a lie for all but perhaps 5 people on this planet.

Erik Naggum

#81. If we bred better programmers we'd clearly breed better bugs.

Anonymous

#82. I always suspected that programmers became programmers because they got to play God with the little universe boxes on their desks.

Jeff Atwood

#83. In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place.

Edgar Wright

#84. Programmers Never Die,
They Just Go Offline

Myself

#85. The linking of rationality with mysticism, knowability with what is unknown, makes it a powerful fetish that offers its programmers and users alike a sense of empowerment, of sovereign subjectivity, that covers over-barely-a sense of profound ignorance.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

#86. Laziness is a programmers main virtue.

Larry Wall

#87. GOTO, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.

Raymond Simard

#88. Digitisation will rather consolidate the broadcasting industry in India because once the cable is digitized, then naturally all the programmers can showcase their programming.

Subhash Chandra

#89. Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many.

Linus Torvalds

#90. The situation is so much better for programmers today - a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want to shoot for.

John Carmack

#91. C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.

Linus Torvalds

#92. If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

Edsger Dijkstra

#93. Programmers can be lazy.

Larry Wall

#94. Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult.

Bob Barton

#95. 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

#96. As Pragmatic Programmers, our base material isn't wood or iron, it's knowledge. We gather requirements as knowledge, and then express that knowledge in our designs, implementations, tests, and documents.

Andrew Hunt

#97. In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

Esther Dyson

#98. My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#99. The Internet's a driving force in the change from mass media to 'my media,' in which consumers will be their own programmers.

Jerry Yang

#100. 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