#programmers quotes

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

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

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.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

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.

If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.

Nine people can't make a baby in a month.

A programmer does not primarily write code; rather, he primarily writes to another programmer about his problem solution. The understanding of this fact is the final step in his maturation as technician.

If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.

Never trust a programmer in a suit.

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.

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.

Profanity is the one language all programmers know best.

Programmer — an organism that turns coffee into software.

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.

Get out of the way of your developers or lose them to someone who will.

Programmers have to fight against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and stupidity.

Programmers are as emotional and irrational as normal people.

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

The most obvious common ‘personality’ characteristics of hackers are high intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual abstractions. Also, most hackers are ‘neophiles’, stimulated by and appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty). Most are also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.

Good programmers don't just write programs. They build a working vocabulary.

We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.

Good engineers make solutions obsolete. Great engineers make themselves obsolete.

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!

This is essentially what a program was, a love letter from the programmer to the hardware, full of the intimate details known only to partners in an affair.

Writing software as if we are the only person that ever has to comprehend it is one of the biggest mistakes and false assumptions that can be made.

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

The code you write makes you a programmer. The code you delete makes you a good one. The code you don't have to write makes you a great one.

Hiring bad developers is like drinking seawater. It seems to satisfy a need while actually increasing it.

If you say “I told you so”, you are the one who has failed. Because you knew, but did not manage to stop the train wreck.

A generalist is a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, whereas a generalizing specialist is a jack-of-all-trades and master of a few. Big difference.

Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it.

Programmers are often angry because they’re often scared.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.