Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.
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.
All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.
God help us, we’re in the hands of engineers.
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.
Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
To be a hacker – when I use the term – is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.
Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.
Our job as the game creators or developers – the programmers, artists, and whatnot – is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user’s shoes. We try to see what they’re seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.
C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.