Programmers Quotes

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
— Nathaniel S Borenstein

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. — Stan Kelly-Bootle

Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn’t work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. — Karl Lehenbauer

Please don’t fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatical about [the goto statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a single trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!
— Edsger Dijkstra

Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.
— Paul Graham

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.
— Larry Wall

XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language. — Charles Simonyi

Using TSO is like kicking a dead whale down the beach.
— Stephen C Johnson

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code.
— Paul Graham

Reusing pieces of code is liked picking off sentences from other people’s stories and trying to make a magazine article.
— Bob Frankston

[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!
— Mark Andreessen

Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free.
— Linus Torvalds

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic. — Rear Admiral

If you don’t think carefully, you might think that programming is just typing statements in a programming language. — Ward Cunningham

A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. — Dennis M Ritchie

Projects promoting programming in natural language are intrinsically doomed to fail. — Edsger Dijkstra