Programming Quotes

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
--Niklaus Wirth

Software Engineering is that part of Computer Science which is too difficult for the Computer Scientist.
--Friedrich L. Bauer

The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.
--Edsger Dijkstra

Adding last-minute features, whether in response to competitive pressure, as a developer's pet feature, or on the whim of management, causes more bugs in software than almost anything else.
--John Robbins

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want.
--Bram Cohen

Architecture is the tension between coupling and cohesion.
--Neal Ford

Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.
--Cory House

There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.
--Kyle Simpson

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
--Phil Karlton

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.
--Donald Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
--Pablo Picasso