Chad > Chad's Quotes

“At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
― C.A.R. Hoare

“If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.”
― Claude McKay

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.”
― Why The Lucky Stiff

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
― Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”
― John Woods

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

“I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.”
― Kent Beck

“Truth can only be found in one place: the code.”
― Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

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

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

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

“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

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”
― Edward V. Berard

“The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”
― Alan Kay

“The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
― Joseph Weizenbaum

“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

“You are not reading this book because a teacher assigned it to you, you are reading it because you have a desire to learn, and wanting to learn is the biggest advantage you can have.”
― Cory Althoff, The Self-Taught Programmer: The Definitive Guide to Programming Professionally

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”
― Brian Kernighan

“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

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

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

“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

“Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant
to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap
bubble?”
― Alan J Perlis

“Don't gloss over a routine or piece of code involved in the bug because you "know" it works. Prove it. Prove it in this context, with this data, with these boundary conditions.”
― Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Take time to learn the closest thing that we have to a SUPERPOWER - Code”
― Sharen Eddings

“Programming is learned
by writing programs.”
― Brian Kernighan

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.”
― Tom Clancy