Best Programmers Quotes & Sayings

It may be no coincidence that the world's richest man is a computer programmer. Programmers have "theories" about how software will behave when they change a line of code. Those theories rarely hold up to their first encounter with reality. Unsuccessful programmers could probably wax eloquent about how things should be different. Successful programmers just debug their code. Such a profession would quickly wean a person from idealistic notions about how to make a change. Successful programmers soon learn that it is more profitable to challenge their own thinking than to curse their computers when faced with unexpected results. — Ron Davison

Computers: he always fixed on computers when his mind wandered into the future
instruments he revered and hated. The computer world was a place where snotty kids knew everything and nothing ... The computer was part of a future cloudy, unpredictable and menacing. — Howard Fast

The difference between a bad programmer and a good programmer is understanding. That is, bad programmers don't understand what they are doing and good programmers do. - Max Kanat-Alexander — Steve Fenton

A very good senior programmer (who might get paid $200,000) gets paid about the same as a great programmer, who delivers $5 million worth of value for the same price. That's enough of a difference to build an entire company's profit around. Do it with ten programmers and you're rich. — Seth Godin

With the revolution around 1980 of PCs, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers - not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. It increased their capabilities. — Rodney Brooks

Even for the very best programmers ah, sometimes you'll see someone else's program or somebody will come along and they'll show you what can be done in a simpler way. — Bill Gates

In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work. — Robert Fano

The best computer programmers are much better than novices at remembering the overall structure of programs because they understand better what they're intended to do and how. — Geoff Colvin

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API. — Charles Petzold

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C. — Linus Torvalds

'On demand' is more than just a series of clicks on your still-too-complicated remote control. In fact, it is now the best way to describe what the cable industry - from programmers to content makers to distributors - imagine their world is. Services and content available to very demanding consumers, wherever, whenever, however. — Kara Swisher

In a recent survey, innovative people - from inventors to scientists, writers to programmers - were asked what techniques they used. Over 70% believed they got their best ideas by exploring areas they were not experts in — Scott Berkun

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. — Mitchell Baker

Software development takes immense intellectual effort. Even the best programmers can rarely sustain that level of effort for more than a few hours a day. Beyond that, they need to rest their brains a bit, which is why they always seem to be surfing the Internet or playing games when you barge in on them. — Joel Spolsky

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality. — Jessica Livingston

The programmers decided the steps everyone on board Hyperion would need to take to do everything from dimming the lights to raising the sails. — Michael Lewis

Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue."
Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue.
"But I think the writers had their turn," she says, "and now it's programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system."
I am definitely talking to a girl from Google. "So what's the next upgrade?"
"It's already happening," she says. "There are all these things you can do, and it's like you're in more than one place at one time, and it's totally normal. I mean, look around."
I swivel my head, and I see what she wants me to see: dozens of people sitting at tiny tables, all learning into phones showing them places that don't exist and yet are somehow more interesting ... — Robin Sloan

The system metaphor is a story that everyone
customers, programmers, and managers
can tell about how the system works. — Kent Beck

This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists ... by spending time alone practicing what they love. — Meg Cabot

I found out that most programmers don't like to test their software as intensely as I do. — Kent Beck

The best designers and the best programmers aren't the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn't matter. That's where the real gains are made. — Jason Fried

When people write software, they are not writing it for themselves. In fact, they are not even writing primarily for the computer. Rather, good programmers know that code is written for the next human being who has to read it in order to maintain or reuse it. If that person cannot understand the code, it's all but useless in a realistic development scenario. — Mark Lutz

Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie. — Erik Naggum

The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability. — Randall E. Stross

The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don't kid yourself about that, not even for a second. — Jose Ferreira

Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. "In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes," he said. "When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. — Michael Lewis

The best computer programmers never write a new program when they can use an old one for a new job. — Gerald M. Weinberg

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various "modern" C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion. — John Carmack

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully. — Alan Kay

From the day Microsoft was started, the only constraint to our growth has been attracting ah, more great programmers, very smart, committed, ah, people. And so we're always on ... on the look for ah, that kind of person. — Bill Gates

One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. — Jamie Zawinski

The most successful computer programmers aren't the ones who approach programming as a task they have to carry out in order to get their paychecks. They're the ones for whom programming is a joyful game. — Anonymous

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

She had a theory that the fear of getting in trouble was what made her not as good a programmer and that, in fact, it was all linked to testosterone, and that was why there were more guy programmers than women. It was a very hazy theory, and she didn't like it, but she had pretty much convinced herself it was true, although she couldn't bear to think of sharing it with anybody, because it was a lot better to think that there were social reasons why girls didn't usually become code monkeys than to think there were biological reasons. — Maureen F. McHugh

Great programmers learn how to program their tools, not just use them. — Steve Yegge

Programmers Never Die,
They Just Go Offline — Myself

Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.) — Brian Kernighan

Systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult. — Bob Barton

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built. — Niklaus Wirth

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it! — John Carmack

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. — Orson Scott Card

The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls. — Charley Pride

Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP. — Guy Kawasaki

When you choose a language, youre also choosing a community. The programmers youll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages. — Philip Greenspun

I should have known from watching Henry work at the office: programmers moved slowly and deliberately, and then waited to see the reaction. And if they did not succeed the first time, they would try over and over again, until they broke through that fifth dimension and got it right. — Jodi Picoult

Programming requires more concentration than other activities. It's the reason programmers get upset about 'quick interruptions' - such interruptions are tantamount to asking a juggler to keep three balls in the air and hold your groceries at the same time. — Steve McConnell

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world. — Walter Mosley

Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games. — Jeff Atwood

And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we've done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them. — Louisa Hall

If we bred better programmers we'd clearly breed better bugs. — Anonymous

When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they're agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers - not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble - but at the back end, we're in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers' biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency - sorry, — Charles Stross

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people. — Robert C. Martin

If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care. — Barbara Ehrenreich

How many computer programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Are you kidding? That's a hardware problem! — Various

They may have used alien technology in these things," she said. "But the software they installed to run it all was clearly created by humans - overworked, underpaid programmers like me who take all kinds of shortcuts. The security protocols on the file-sharing system are a total joke. It only took me about five minutes to jailbreak this thing. — Ernest Cline

In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place. — Edgar Wright