In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately, Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer, you’re linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to. — Dennis Miller

Cryptography restrictions are the USA’s Maginot Line: Big, expensive, ultimately routed around regardless, and once the war is over, difficult to get rid of.
— Russell Nelson

The userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work. — Carl Ellison

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. — Albert Einstein

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
— Charles Mingus

In the interests of clarity, it seemed necessary to constantly remind myself to pay not the slightest attention to the elegance of the presentation; I adhered conscientiously to the rule of the brilliant theoretician, Ludwig Boltzmann, to leave elegance to tailors and shoemakers.
— Albert Einstein

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust. — Samuel Butler

By three methods we may learn technical writing: First by education, which is noblest; second by methodology, which is easiest; and third by planting your butt in a chair and pecking out the damn document, which is the bitterest.
— Andrew Plato

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users. — Edward Tufte

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

If you can’t do it in Fortran, do it in assembly language. If you can’t do it in assembly language, it isn’t worth doing.
— Ed Post

Other advanced languages, such as assembler and C, were not terribly complex in themselves, but the environments in which applications were developed were downright weird, with mines scattered about everywhere, ready to blow the inattentive programmer out of the water.
— Bruce Tognazzini

BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.
— Seymour Papert

PL/I and Ada started out with all the bloat, were very daunting languages, and got bad reputations (deservedly). C++ has shown that if you slowly bloat up a language over a period of years, people don’t seem to mind as much.
— James Hague

And despite the occasional predictions that assembly language will be outlawed by the US government sometime this decade, it is likely that someone who is absolutely determined to sink to the lowest level of programming languages will be able to find an employer who will indulge his base instincts.
— Ed Yourdon

A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don’t have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed.
— Ed Yourdon

In My Egotistical Opinion, most people’s C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt. — Blair P. Houghton

If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor and when was the last time you needed one?
— Tom Cargill

Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks. — Thant Tessman

You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN. It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar. — Bill Joy

C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good.
— Bertrand Meyer

From a practical viewpoint, it’s easy to see that C will always be with us, taking a place beside Fortran and Cobol as the right tool for certain jobs.
— Larry O’Brien

Eiffel has perhaps the image of a cruel professor giving students tough assignments and not accepting excuses. C/C++, on the other hand, has an almost sports-car image.
— John Nagle

The tree large enough that a stake capable of killing COBOL could be fashioned from its trunk has not yet grown anywhere upon the face of this verdant planet.
— Dan Martinez

You can tell how far we have to go, when FORTRAN is the language of supercomputers.
— Steven Feiner

A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard. — John Krueger

A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don’t have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed.
— Ed Yourdon

When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
— Edsger Dijkstra

Cobol has almost no fervent enthusiasts. As a programming tool, it has roughly the sex appeal of a wrench.
— Charles Petzold

Eiffel: The Programming Language is certainly by far the most expensive piece of fiction on my bookshelf. Excellent, entertaining fiction, but it remains fiction nevertheless. — Lasse Petersen

Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
— Reference Manual

I knew I’d hate COBOL the moment I saw they’d used perform instead of do.
— Larry Wall

As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve The Problem, saving the documentation for later. Long live FORTRAN!
— Ed Post

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
— Edsger Dijkstra

FORTRAN’s DO statement is far scarier than GOTO ever was. Nothing can match the sheer gibbering horror of the ‘come from’ loop if the programmer didn’t document it well.
— Mark Hughes

COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others (for business data processing) are so much worse. — Robert Glass

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg. — Bjarne Stroustrup

If C++ has taught me one thing, it’s this: Just because the system is consistent doesn’t mean it’s not the work of Satan. — Andrew Plotkin

Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that grasshoppers taste better than tree bark. — Thant Tessman

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