Programmers Quotes

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

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.

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

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

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

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

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.

The whole HTML validation exercise is questionable, but validating as XHTML is flat-out masochism. Only recommended for those that enjoy pain. Or programmers. I can’t always tell the difference.

I'm still a really shitty programmer, but I know enough to hack a prototype together.

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results

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.

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.

Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.

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.

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.

The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here's a horror film.

Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.

When you think about it, there's no way to input things into a computer. It's all... the holes only go out, right? Like you can plug a keyboard or a mouse in but that's a trick because the computer thinks the inputs are outputs. That's a programmer trick, basically magic. The key to the future is to make holes that go in too.

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.

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.

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time?

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

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

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.

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

There are a couple of people in the world who can really program in C or FØRTRAN. They write more code in less time than it takes for other programmers. Most programmers aren't that good. The problem is that those few programmers who crank out code aren't interested in maintaining it.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless

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.

[Sundance] still feels significant. I don't think you can help but come here and not feel that sense of history and its significance in influencing film. And I think it still does. Some of that is based on history, but it's also based on really incredible programmers who are showcasing such an incredible variety of cinema.

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.

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.

Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

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.

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.

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

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.

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.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

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

This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists... by spending time alone practicing what they love.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

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

... 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.

The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and remove one accessory.