You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
One man’s constant is another man’s variable.
You think you KNOW when you learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?
Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it.
Optimization hinders evolution.
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical.
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.
The computing field is always in need of new cliches.
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.