Curated

The quotes in qotm's current dataset release: what every install shows.

• Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

  — Rob Pike

• I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

  — Charles Darwin

• There’s a balance you have to have between being very critical of yourself and your work while also maintaining a strong faith in your own ability. Your unique voice and perspective matter and if you can find a way to bring that out then you will create something special.

  — Eric Barone

• The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.

  — Eliezer Yudkowsky

• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

  — Donald Knuth

• Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.

  — Paul Vixie

• Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.

  — Robert Musil

• I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

  — Paul Graham

• Though the theory is worthless without the well-observed facts, the facts are useless without the frame of the theory to receive them.

  — Charles Darwin

• Ugly problems often require ugly solutions. Solving an ugly problem in a pure manner is bloody hard.

  — Rasmus Lerdorf

• The desire to explain what is simple by what is complex, what is easy by what is difficult, is a calamity affecting the whole body of science, known, it is true, to men of insight, but not generally admitted.

  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?

  — Bill Gates

• Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

  — Ward Cunningham

• Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the universe which strives to produce bigger idiots. So far the Universe is winning.

  — Rick Cook

• Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

  — Alan Kay

• Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

  — Vernor Vinge

• You can't control what you can't measure

  — Tom DeMarco

• The word 'definition' has come to have a dangerously reassuring sound, owing no doubt to its frequent occurrence in logical and mathematical writings.

  — Willard Van Orman Quine

• The main activity of programming is not the origination of new independent programs, but in the integration, modification, and explanation of existing ones.

  — Terry Winograd

• The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

  — Thomas Henry Huxley