Non 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

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

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

I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that? — Halsey

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

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

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

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

Elegance? It may seem odd to non-scientists, but there is an aesthetic in software as there is in every other area of intellectual endeavour. Truly great programmers are like great poets or great mathematicians - they can achieve in a few lines what lesser mortals can only approach in three volumes — John Naughton

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

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

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

Most non-programmers don't think of plaintext like that. To them, text files feel like filling in tax forms for an angry robotic auditor that yells at them if they forget a single semicolon. — Robert Nystrom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Programmers Never Die,
They Just Go Offline — Myself

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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