programming

• In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

  — Edsger W. Dijkstra

• Using PL/1 must be like flying a plane with 7000 buttons, switches and handles to manipulate in the cockpit.

  — Edsger W. Dijkstra

• There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• Clearly, I reject the view that there is one way that is right for everyone and for every problem

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

  — Bjarne Stroustrup

• 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

• Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

  — Larry Wall

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

  — Donald Knuth

• Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

  — Alan Turing

• People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

  — Donald Knuth

• [ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

  — Alan Kay

• If the advancement of the general art of programming requires the continuing invention and elaboration of paradigms, advancement of the art of the individual programmer requires that he expand his repertory of paradigms.

  — Robert W. Floyd

• You see, the Caml garbage collector is like a god from ancient mythology: mighty, but very irritable. If you mess with it, it'll make you suffer in surprising ways.

  — Xavier Leroy

• I talk to myself through the computer. I ask myself questions, leave things to be looked at again, things that you would do with a notepad. It turns out today that it’s much better today to do with a personal computer rather than a notepad.

  — Seymour Cray

• <code>signal(i, SIG_DFL); /* crunch, crunch, crunch */</code>

  — Larry Wall

• There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity...

  — Larry Wall

• 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 Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've had on PC.

  — John D. Carmack

• There is no programming language, no matter how structured, that will prevent programmers from making bad programs.

  — Larry Flon

• It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

  — Robert C. Martin