Programmer Quotes

When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket. ~ Brenda Laurel

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. ~ Jason Fried

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

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs. ~ Fred Brooks

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn't going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I've ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn't want to do whatever he did. ~ J. Cole

When the superior programmer refrains from coding, his force is felt for a thousand miles. ~ Eric S. Raymond

What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months. ~ Fred Brooks

This works, but it's hard to imagine that anybody except a hard-core functional programmer would consider it pretty. ~ Anonymous

Then I started graduate school at UCLA. I got a part time research assistant job as a programmer on a project involving the use of one computer to measure the performance of another computer. ~ Jon Postel

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming. ~ John Carmack

The primary duty of an exception handler is to get the error out of the lap of the programmer and into the surprised face of the user. Provided you keep this cardinal rule in mind, you can't go far wrong. ~ Verity Stob

If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless - which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you're producing is mediocre, then you're in trouble, as it's too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you're a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing - a task that requires depth. ~ Cal Newport

The act of focusing our mightiest intellectual resources on the elusive goal of goto-less programs has helped us get our minds off all those really tough and possibly unresolvable problems and issues with which today's professional programmer would otherwise have to grapple ~ John Brown

I'm always thinking about songs, I'm thinking of life maybe a little bit more lyrically than a computer programmer or someone like that. ~ Jon Foreman

When fits of creativity run strong, more than one programmer or writer has been known to abandon the desktop for the more spacious floor. ~ Fred Brooks

When I worked as a programmer, that meant eight straight hours of programming without interruption. That was a good day. In contrast, if I was interrupted with questions, process, or - heaven forbid - meetings, I felt bad. ~ Eric Ries

I didn't realize how good I was with technology until I met my parents ... my dad told me "You're good; you should be a computer programmer." I said, "You're bad ... you should be a caveman." ~ Mike Birbiglia

Are you allowing your own expectations to hinder you from freely expressing yourself? Is your idea of the right way keeping you from your best way? Are you too distracted to show up? Are you living like a programmer instead of a poet? ~ Emily P. Freeman

We know that blind evolutionary processes can produce human-level general intelligence, since they have already done so at least once. Evolutionary processes with foresight - that is, genetic programs designed and guided by an intelligent human programmer - should be able to achieve a similar outcome with far greater efficiency. ~ Nick Bostrom

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. ~ Donald Ervin Knuth

It's better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive. ~ Steve McConnell

I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Most of us know that the media tell us our bodies are imperfect - too fat, to smelly, too wrinkled, or too soft. And, even though we may know it's horseshit, these messages still seep into our brains and mess with our self-esteem. In a media-saturated country where most images of women and men have been photoshopped to perfection, it's hard to find a living supermodel (much less a computer programmer), who doesn't wish she had sexier earlobes or a tighter ass. So, buck up, even the prettiest bombshell has body insecurities. You can spend your life thinking your butt's too big (or your cock's too small) or feeling sexy as hell. Make the choice to appreciate your body as it is. ~ Victoria Vantoch

In May 2010, a Florida programmer by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz wanted to test the technology. He offered to buy a pizza for 10,000 coins. The pizza arrived. For several days after that, Hanyecz bought 10,000-bitcoin pizzas. I bet he regrets it now. Ten thousand bitcoins would at one stage be worth over 12 million dollars. Twelve million bucks for a pizza! ~ Dominic Frisby

Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages, ~ Walter Isaacson

If there's one thing you should know about dealing with programmers is do not distract them. Wait for them to come to you. Just put your request in the queue. Never expect a programmer to do something immediately. ~ Anonymous

The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea. ~ Rick Cook

When they reached a maintenance closet, Iko ushered the escort-droid inside.
"I want you to know that I hold nothing against you," she said, by way of introduction. "I understand that it isn't your fault your programmer had so little imagination."
The escort-droid held her gaze with empty eyes.
"In another life, we could have been sisters, and I feel it's important to acknowledge that."
A blank stare. A blink, every six seconds.
"But as it stands, I'm a part of an important mission right now, and I cannot be swayed from my goal by my sympathy for androids who are less advanced than myself."
Nothing.
"All right then." Iko held out her hands. "I need your clothes. ~ Marissa Meyer

Say you spend thirty minutes driving in rush hour every morning and another fifteen getting to your car and into the office. That's 1.5 hours a day, 7.5 hours per week, or somewhere between 300 and 400 hours per year, give or take holidays and vacation. Four hundred hours is exactly the amount of programmer time we spent building Basecamp, our most popular product. Imagine what you could do with 400 extra hours a year. Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment - it's bad for business. ~ Jason Fried

My first job was as a programmer. So I feel like I'm familiar with the information technology sector and the information technology culture. ~ Gene Luen Yang

Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for the average programmer, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accomodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable. ~ Ellen Ullman

The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-It notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer. ~ Ellen Ullman

The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction. ~ Michael Lewis

A program can only do what it's programmed to do, to the letter of the law. Unfortunately, what's written doesn't always coincide with what the programmer intended the program to do. ~ Anonymous

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

In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor ~ Tom DeMarco

Sometimes agents were so influenced by one another that they lost track of their goal and did something else instead. In that sense, the program was very childlike, unpredictable and easily distracted. As one programmer put it - trying to program distributed intelligence is like telling a five year old kid to go to his room and change his clothes. He may do that, but he is equally likely to do something else and never return. ~ Michael Crichton

I'm not a computer person at all. I only know how to turn them on. I'm not a programmer. I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag. ~ Rick Smolan

If you are a programmer working in 2006 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for six months in a submarine. ~ Joel Spolsky

If this code works, it was written by Paul DiLascia. If not, I don't know who wrote it ..I'll be laughing when I'm old and and all my programmer friends have gone alexic from staring at too many tiny pixels ~ Paul Dilascia

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer. ~ Marvin Minsky

By trade, I am a software programmer, so I never really had any experience with movies before. I started out with 'Paranormal Activity.' ~ Oren Peli

I am a non-accredited, overly logical psychologist, therapist, mechanic, diplomat, businessman, and Teacher working in an industry that is still defining itself each and every day.
That is as concise a definition I can give for the modern-day
programmer. ~ Ka Wai Cheung

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n. ~ Joel Spolsky

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent". ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Do not be alarmed by the minor inconsistencies in the syntax. They are meant to heighten your level of attention and thereby make you a better programmer. ~ David Geary

I'm still a really shitty programmer, but I know enough to hack a prototype together. ~ Dennis Crowley

It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer. ~ Kevin Systrom

You are reading this book for two reasons. First, you are a programmer. Second, you want to be a better programmer. Good. We need better programmers. ~ Robert C. Martin

First solve the problem. Then, write the code. ~ Waseem Latif

I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all. ~ Chris Parnell

If you think you're a really good programmer ... read Knuth's Art of Computer Programming ... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing. ~ Bill Gates

In 1962, a typo by a NASA programmer resulted in Mariner 1 being sent into the ocean rather than its intended destination, Venus. The cause was a missed hyphen. ~ Drummond Moir

But to me, each revision of the document simply showed how far the initial Flevel implementation had progressed. Those parts of the language that were not yet implemented were still described in free-flowing flowery prose giving promise of unalloyed delight. In the parts that had been implemented, the flowers had withered; they were choked by an undergrowth of explanatory footnotes, placing arbitrary and unpleasant restrictions on the use of each feature and loading upon a programmer the responsibility for controlling the complex and unexpected side-effects and interaction effects with all the other features of the language. ~ C.A.R. Hoare

Man is programmed to find the programmer. ~ Kedar Joshi

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works. ~ Clive Thompson

I know you are thinking 'logically' like a programmer because you got used to doing so for many years now, but this is more related to the heart. I don't think you'd understand that. ~ Sriharsha Sripada

It is, therefore, possible to extend a partially specified interpretation to a complete interpretation, without loss of verifiability, [ ... ] This fact offers the possibility of automatic verification of programs, the programmer merely tagging entrances and one edge in each innermost loop. ~ Robert W. Floyd

The idea was that while one person wrote code, the other programmer would massage his or her shoulders; then they would switch. ~ Nick Bilton

Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it, the user or the developer (programmer or engineer). ~ Larry Tesler

In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true. ~ G. Willow Wilson

It is a real service to humanity and the world to be a good programmer, particularly if you design great products. You make is easier for everybody, everybody has less headaches. ~ Frederick Lenz

Did that high-and-mighty attitude of yours come attached to you when you were spawned?!
Was it a bug your programmer couldn't fix?! ~ CLAMP

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs. ~ Tim O'Reilly

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. ~ Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

As a feminist I feel immediately guilty because everyone is trying to encourage girls into STEM subjects now, but to be honest I'm not dedicated enough to the Vagenda to force myself to become a computer programmer. ~ Laura Steven

Once a programmer had a problem. He thought he could solve it with a regular expression. Now he had two problems. ~ Jamie Zawinski

The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme. ~ Kevin Mitnick

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer. ~ Larry Wall

Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster - but not worse. ~ Martha Stewart

Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free. ~ Richard Stallman

He didn't exactly have the "programmer" look to him, if you know what I mean. He'd be the programmer's boss. The one they hated. The one who made them work on holidays. ~ John Scalzi

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. ~ Ellen Ullman

The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used. ~ Fernando J. Corbato

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul. ~ John Carmack

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. ~ Larry Wall

Not having a schedule is OK if it's your PhD and you plan to spend 14 years on the thing, or if you're a programmer working on the next Duke Nukem and we'll ship when we're good and ready. But for almost any kind of real business, you just have to know how long things are going to take, because developing a product costs money. ~ Joel Spolsky

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later. ~ John Carmack

The world is changing, and I believe that, if I want to stay employed as a programmer, I'm going to have to change with it. ~ Kent Beck

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. ~ Linus Torvalds

The complexity of C++ (even more complexity has been added in the new C++), and the resulting impact on productivity, is no longer justified. All the hoops that the C++ programmer had to jump through in order to use a C-compatible language make no sense anymore - they're just a waste of time and effort. Now, Go makes much more sense for the class of problems that C++ was originally intended to solve. ~ Bruce Eckel

Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility. ~ Jessica Livingston

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination. ~ Graham Moore

I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age 15. ~ Andy Weir

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous. ~ Bjarne Stroustrup

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. ~ Seymour Cray

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

It's a very complex network of genes making products which go into the nucleus and turn on other genes. And, in fact, you find a continuing network of processes going on in a very complex way by which genes are subject to these continual adjustments, as you might say - the computer programmer deciding which genes ultimately will work. ~ John Gurdon

I've been a DJ, janitor, ditch digger, waitress, computer instructor, programmer, mechanic, web developer, clerk, manager, marketing director, tour guide and dorm manager, among other things. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language. ~ Yukihiro Matsumoto

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. ~ Joseph Weizenbaum

Implement "is a" through public inheritance. When a programmer decides to create a new class by inheriting from an existing class, that programmer is saying that the new class "is a" more specialized version of the older class. The base class sets expectations about how the derived class will operate and imposes constraints on how the derived class can operate (Meyers 1998). ~ Steve McConnell

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits. ~ Kent Beck

The Vedic viewpoint presents a type of linguistic realism in which reality is the 'text' which is being processed by the observer. Reality can also be modified by adding text to it similar to how a programmer programs a computer by inputting a computer program. ~ Ashish Dalela

From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ - but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer. ~ Yukihiro Matsumoto

Programmer Chris Camfield was in charge of implementing the tactical layer battle mechanics. A lifelong player of pencil-and-paper role-playing games as well as strategy board games, Camfield instinctively turned to RPG sourcebooks (tomes of information compiled to assist role players in creating more vibrant worlds) for more detail, taking advantage of the meticulous research published by other designers. ~ Anonymous

It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple! ~ Robert C. Martin

I don't like the feeling, but I've got to say that a little fear makes me a more focused, more responsible programmer. ~ Kent Beck