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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
Sep 10, 2025
Java is C++ without the guns, clubs and knives.
Software sucks because users demand it to.
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Any fool can use a computer. Many do.
No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.
I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer.
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that 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. They are, in short, a perfect match.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
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.
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
It's a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don't learn from our successes.
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.
I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
If at first you don't succeed, Call an airstrike.
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to the working state.
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.
I'm not anti-social. I'm just not social.
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
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