Programmer Quotes

1. "Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis."
Author: Alan Perlis

2. "You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN."
Author: Alan Perlis

3. "We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses."
Author: Alan Perlis

4. "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing."
Author: Alan Perlis

5. "What programmer didn't live with a deadline over his head?"
Author: B.V. Larson

6. "The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel."
Author: Bjarne Stroustrup

7. "My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities."
Author: Bjarne Stroustrup

8. "The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless."
Author: Bram Cohen

9. "When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket."
Author: Brenda Laurel

10. "And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code."
Author: Brian Behlendorf

11. "Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it. Our applications are complex because we are ambitious to use our computers in ever more sophisticated ways. Programming is complex because of the large number of conflicting objectives for each of our programming projects. If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution."
Author: C.A.R. Hoare

12. "But to me, each revision of the document simply showed how far the initial Flevel implementation had progressed. Those parts of the language that were not yet implemented were still described in free-flowing flowery prose giving promise of unalloyed delight. In the parts that had been implemented, the flowers had withered; they were choked by an undergrowth of explanatory footnotes, placing arbitrary and unpleasant restrictions on the use of each feature and loading upon a programmer the responsibility for controlling the complex and unexpected side-effects and interaction effects with all the other features of the language."
Author: C.A.R. Hoare

13. "What was amazing was that a large team of highly intelligent programmers could labor so hard and so long on such an unpromising project. You know, you shouldn't trust us intelligent programmers. We can think up such good arguments for convincing ourselves and each other of the utterly absurd. Especially don't believe us when we promise to repeat an earlier success, only bigger and better next time."
Author: C.A.R. Hoare

14. "To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API."
Author: Charles Petzold

15. "Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)"
Author: Charles Stross

16. "Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes.Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.Some, downright weird.But then again, you'd have to be.To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors."
Author: Christopher Hopper

17. "There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them."
Author: Dave Parnas

18. "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."
Author: Donald Ervin Knuth

19. "Few classical programmers found prototypal inheritance to be acceptable, and classically inspired syntax obscures the language's true prototypal nature. It is the worst of both worlds."
Author: Douglas Crockford

20. "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."
Author: Edsger Dijkstra

21. "All programmers are optimists"
Author: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

22. "The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."
Author: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

23. "The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming."
Author: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

24. "Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility."
Author: Jessica Livingston

25. "Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers."
Author: Jessica Livingston

26. "Sun's role in the grand scheme of development is to work on the runtime environment and the APIs. The tools we produce are much more for systems programmers, not enterprise developers."
Author: John Fowler

27. "You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity."
Author: John Romero

28. "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."
Author: Joseph Weizenbaum

29. "I am a programmer."
Author: Ken Thompson

30. "Collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system developed by AT&T for"
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

31. "Another: to geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars, and software programmers. We're going to uncover the secrets of a remarkable lawyer, look at"
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

32. "Programmers work in bursts of productivity. Then, they let the brain rest and get back into it. A lot about the office world is not a great fit for me."
Author: Marco Arment

33. "Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself."
Author: Marco Tempest

34. "Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability."
Author: Marissa Mayer

35. "Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well."
Author: Mitchell Baker

36. "The idea was that while one person wrote code, the other programmer would massage his or her shoulders; then they would switch."
Author: Nick Bilton

37. "My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers."
Author: Niklaus Wirth

38. "By trade, I am a software programmer, so I never really had any experience with movies before. I started out with 'Paranormal Activity.'"
Author: Oren Peli

39. "God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause."
Author: Orson Scott Card

40. "Many programmers would prefer to mock in their client library specs, but doing so could result in the service and client passing all specs with hidden failures."
Author: Paul Dix

41. "One thing that separates good programmers from bad programmers is that good programmers are more facile at jumping between layers of abstraction—they can keep the layers distinct while making changes and choose the right layer to make changes in."
Author: Peter Seibel

42. "If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."
Author: Richard Stallman

43. "I am a composer, horn player, and computer programmer."
Author: Robert Patterson

44. "America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want."
Author: Robin Sloan

45. "All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works."
Author: Seth Godin

46. "The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."
Author: Seymour Cray

47. "Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song."
Author: Walter Isaacson

48. "Most kids are not dreaming of being programmers, scientists or engineers."
Author: Will.i.am

49. "In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use."
Author: Yukihiro Matsumoto

50. "From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer."
Author: Yukihiro Matsumoto

Programmer Quotes Pictures