Programming Quotes

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

Software is either testable or detestable.
--Anonymous

Code is there to explain the comments to the computer.
--Andy Harris

Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self.
--Damian Conway

It’s not a bug; it’s an undocumented feature.
--Anonymous

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

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

It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.
--Steve McConnell

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
--Dennis Ritchie

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
--Ken Thompson

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
--Kent Beck

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
--Donald Knuth

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

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
--Harold Abelson

All models are wrong, but some models are useful.
--George Box (context)

Programming is the immediate act of producing code. Software engineering is the set of policies, practices, and tools that are necessary to make that code useful for as long as it needs to be used and allowing collaboration across a team.
-- Titus Winters, Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.
--Brian W. Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.
--Mark Pearce

C++ tries to guard against Murphy, not Machiavelli.
--Damian Conway

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay

First make the change easy (warning: this might be hard), then make the easy change.
--Kent Beck

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
--Jamie Zawinski

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.
--DeMarco and Lister

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
--Tony Hoare

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