Quotes List
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
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 Grace Hopper
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
Pointers are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of the data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backwards from which we may never recover.
— Charles Hoare
The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is duplication. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information.
— Alan J Perlis
First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.
— George Carrette
I fear the the new object-oriented systems may suffer the fate of LISP, in that they can do many things, but the complexity of the class hierarchies may cause them to collapse under their own weight.
— Bill Joy
