Quotes & Sayings About Computer Programmers

Yeah, young coders abound, but mostly only string together preassembled digital beads, and even today's brightest young nerdlets aren't immune to eventual wrinkles. As for real experts, well, as the dawn of the computer age recedes, so too have the hairlines of your true computer wizards, the males I mean. We females never change, we are eternally young. — Rajnar Vajra

In fact, there are autism clusters, you know, around some of the big tech centers. You take two socially awkward computer programmers and put them together, that can kind of concentrate the autistic genes. — Temple Grandin

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 last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands.The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys. — Daniel H. Pink

GOTO, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers. — Raymond Simard

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

Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers. — Jessica Livingston

Tests are stories we tell the next generation of programmers on a project. — Roy Osherove

All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. — Seth Godin

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

Teaming up with the scientists, researchers and computer programmers at Intel to collaborate and co-develop new ways to communicate, create, inform and entertain is going to be amazing. — Will.i.am

When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology. — Howard Rheingold

The company I invested in is probably a leader in that area. They're a company called Second Spectrum, which happens to be based in LA but was started by two USC computer-science professors. It's filled with guys who love sports, who played sports, but really look like programmers. — Steve Ballmer

While we may continue to use the words
smart and stupid, and while IQ tests may
persist for certain purposes, the monopoly
of those who believe in a single general
intelligence has come to an end. Brain
scientists and geneticists are documenting
the incredible differentiation of human capacities, computer programmers are creating systems that are intelligent in different ways, and educators are freshly acknowledging that their students have distinctive strengths and weaknesses. — Howard Gardner

On every full moon, rituals ... take place on hilltops, beaches, in open fields and in ordinary houses. Writers, teachers, nurses, computer programmers, artists, lawyers, poets, plumbers, and auto mechanics
women and men from many backgrounds come together to celebrate the mysteries of the Triple Goddess of the Dance of Life. The religion they practice is called Witchcraft. — Starhawk

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. — Bill Bryson

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor. — Brian Kernighan

Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation. — Bertrand Meyer

Getting C programmers to understand that they cause the computer to do less than minimum is intractable. ... Ask him why he thinks he should be able to get away with unsafe code, core dumps, viruses, buffer overruns, undetected errors, etc., just because he wants speed. — Erik Naggum

Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats — John Naughton

Poke the box How do computer programmers learn their art? Is there a step-by-step process that guarantees you'll get good? All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works. The box might be a computer or it might be a market or it might be a customer or it might be your boss. It's a puzzle, one that can be solved in only one way - by poking. — Seth Godin

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity. — James Gleick

It's there as a sop to former Ada programmers. — Larry Wall

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

There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them. — Dave Parnas

What a waste of time it would be to insist that everyone develop each of the specialties we call upon to an equal level. We'd get bogged down in remedial training programs, trying to get the cornet players up to speed with the computer programmers, sacrificing the tends to be exceptional in so many individual situations in order to be average in all of them. — Robert Watson

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down ... and writes.
Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange.
Some, downright weird.
But then again, you'd have to be.
To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors. — Christopher Hopper

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with
sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles,
their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised
to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems
to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so
transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts
over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic
text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours
at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them:
coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near
the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and
unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are
oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
These are computer bums, compulsive programmers ... — Joseph Weizenbaum

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler

Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements. — Jamais Cascio

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

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match. — Bill Bryson

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

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

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

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

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