Alim Aytar > Alim's Quotes

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
― Keith Bostic

“That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.”
― Larry Niven

“Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others, self-harm, and suicide attempts.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day.
Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.”
― Muhammad Waseem

“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.”
― Donald E. Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science

“When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.”
― Larry Wall

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
― Charles Babbage

“The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“We see a lot of feature-driven product design in which the cost of features is not properly accounted. Features can have a negative value to customers because they make the products more difficult to understand and use. We are finding that people like products that just work. It turns out that designs that just work are much harder to produce that designs that assemble long lists of features.”
― Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out it was an awful lot of fun. Of course the paying customers got shafted every now and then and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them setting them off in new directions and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible sales-men. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age

“Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.”
― Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software

“Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. ”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Programming, it turns out, is hard. The fundamental rules are typically simple and clear. But programs built on top of these rules tend to become complex enough to introduce their own rules and complexity. You’re building your own maze, in a way, and you might just get lost in it.”
― Marijn Haverbeke

“Functions that create values are easier to combine in new ways than functions that directly perform side effects”
― Marijn Haverbeke

“Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.”
― Joshua Bloch, Effective Java : Programming Language Guide

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“It is not only the violin that shapes the violinist, we are all shaped by the tools we train ourselves to use, and in this respect programming languages have a devious influence: they shape our thinking habits.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
― Martin Fowler

“There is nothing good or bad about knowledge itself; morality lies in the application of knowledge.”
― Jon Erickson

“Your limitations are largely programming instilled by others that you choose to believe.”
― Gary Hopkins

“It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?”
― Alan J. Perlis

“Programming is breaking of one big impossible task into several very small possible tasks.”
― Jazzwant

“In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”
― John D. Carmack

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
― Donald Knuth

“Like so many things in software, MVC was invented by Smalltalkers in the seventies. Lispers probably claim they came up with it in the sixties but didn't bother writing it down.”
― Robert Nystrom, Game Programming Patterns

“Kids who are good at traditional school—repeating rote concepts and facts on a test—can fall apart in a situation where that isn’t enough. Programming rewards the experimental, curious mind.”
― Ketil Moland Olsen