Quotes About Programmers

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

Alan Perlis

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

Tom Van Vleck

#3. Hackers, makers, programmers, engineers, nerds, techies - what we'll call "geeks" for the rest of the book (deal with it) - we're a creative lot who don't like to be told what to do.

Jeff Potter

#4. The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

Richard Dawkins

#5. Object-oriented programming as it emerged in Simula 67 allows software structure to be based on real-world structures, and gives programmers a powerful way to simplify the design and construction of complex programs.

David Gelernter

#6. The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#7. 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

#8. It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly,

Tom Holt

#9. You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.

John Romero

#10. 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

#11. The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

Eric S. Raymond

#12. The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.

Charley Pride

#13. But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.

Robin Sloan

#14. In a recent survey, innovative people - from inventors to scientists, writers to programmers - were asked what techniques they used. Over 70% believed they got their best ideas by exploring areas they were not experts in

Scott Berkun

#15. Programmers are as emotional and irrational as normal people

Douglas Crockford

#16. Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.

Walter Isaacson

#17. Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats

John Naughton

#18. Mentally mutilated potential programmers beyond hope of regeneration.

Edsger Dijkstra

#19. The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don't kid yourself about that, not even for a second.

Jose Ferreira

#20. Programmers work in bursts of productivity. Then, they let the brain rest and get back into it. A lot about the office world is not a great fit for me.

Marco Arment

#21. Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers.

Jessica Livingston

#22. The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

Niklaus Wirth

#23. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.

Jamie Zawinski

#24. The best computer programmers never write a new program when they can use an old one for a new job.

Gerald M. Weinberg

#25. Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations ... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.'

Peter Drucker

#26. The most successful computer programmers aren't the ones who approach programming as a task they have to carry out in order to get their paychecks. They're the ones for whom programming is a joyful game.

Anonymous

#27. 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

#28. C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

Alan Perlis

#29. Of all the Programmers' planets, ours is the supercomputing golden child, the world that inexplicably provides enough power to light up the galaxy.

David Eagleman

#30. Any verbose and tedious solution is error-prone because programmers get bored.

Bjarne Stroustrup

#31. A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.

Bill Bryson

#32. Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games.

Jeff Atwood

#33. Many programmers would prefer to mock in their client library specs, but doing so could result in the service and client passing all specs with hidden failures.

Paul Dix

#34. Any fool can write a test that helps them today. Good programmers write tests that help the entire team in the future.

Anonymous

#35. LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

Alan Perlis

#36. Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

James Gleick

#37. How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Are you kidding? That's a hardware problem!

Various

#38. Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.

Marco Tempest

#39. Facebook is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its 'population' comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people's online activities and identities.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#40. In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

Eric S. Raymond

#41. Errors in code are what programmers call bugs, though when our programs go wrong, we prefer to call them "unexpected additional features." Very

Paul Wilton

#42. To harness the power of television for the education of our nation's children, everyone must get involved - television programmers, government leaders, teachers, and above all, parents.

Edwin Newman

#43. Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP.

Guy Kawasaki

#44. Humans make mistakes. Programmers are bound to make mistakes. Hackers, you can bet your life, are going to be there to exploit those mistakes.

Michael Demon Calce

#45. We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp.

Guy Steele

#46. My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers.

Niklaus Wirth

#47. If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#48. ENGINEERS and programmers have an old saying that Eric's father liked to quote: no design survives an encounter with reality. His mother preferred the military version: no plan survives contact with the enemy.

D.A. Hill

#49. Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.

Erik Naggum

#50. Chefs work with food, artists with oil paint, programmers with code.

Steve Lohr

#51. Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

Larry Wall

#52. Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

John Carmack

#53. From the day Microsoft was started, the only constraint to our growth has been attracting ah, more great programmers, very smart, committed, ah, people. And so we're always on ... on the look for ah, that kind of person.

Bill Gates

#54. Programmers are Tiny Gods

Derek Powazek

#55. They were brilliant, widely read, incisive, and effortlessly effective analysts and programmers. Which is another reason why, ultimately, so many people died.

Charles Stross

#56. The best computer programmers are much better than novices at remembering the overall structure of programs because they understand better what they're intended to do and how.

Geoff Colvin

#57. Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.

Bjarne Stroustrup

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

David Gelernter

#59. America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.

Robin Sloan

#60. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is an expert of understatement in his leadership of Linux development community. When eager programmers would ask him, '"What part of Linux should I work on?' his answer would usually be, '"Let me know when you find out' (p.286).

Dan Woods

#61. The company I invested in is probably a leader in that area. They're a company called Second Spectrum, which happens to be based in LA but was started by two USC computer-science professors. It's filled with guys who love sports, who played sports, but really look like programmers.

Steve Ballmer

#62. When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.

Annalee Newitz

#63. 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

#64. All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.

Seth Godin

#65. Sun's role in the grand scheme of development is to work on the runtime environment and the APIs. The tools we produce are much more for systems programmers, not enterprise developers.

John Fowler

#66. I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?

Halsey

#67. Imagine a bunch of swashbuckling programmers pillaging and hoarding software gems from rich codebases around the seven software seas. Daring. But dangerous. It's coding with the bad hygiene of a salty seaman.

Anonymous

#68. Programmers have a saying: garbage in, garbage out.

Paul Krugman

#69. Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. ... Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants speed.

Erik Naggum

#70. Our job as the game creators or developers - the programmers, artists, and whatnot - is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user's shoes. We try to see what they're seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

Shigeru Miyamoto

#71. 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

#72. I've always written. I'm from an older generation of programmers [who] did not come out of engineering. [A]ll sorts of people were drawn in from the social sciences and humanities.

Ellen Ullman

#73. The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,
fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

#74. I should have known from watching Henry work at the office: programmers moved slowly and deliberately, and then waited to see the reaction. And if they did not succeed the first time, they would try over and over again, until they broke through that fifth dimension and got it right.

Jodi Picoult

#75. Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it ... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

Tony Hoare

#76. Swear programmers code them to be annoying, pedantic little fucks.

Ann Aguirre

#77. When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.

Howard Rheingold

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

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

Bob Barton

#85. Programmers can be lazy.

Larry Wall

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

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

Larry Wall

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

Jeff Atwood

#91. 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

#92. 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

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

Richard P. Gabriel

#94. 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

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

Marissa Mayer

#96. Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.

Niklaus Wirth

#97. 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

#98. 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

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

Seymour Cray

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

Sandi Metz