1.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.
John von Neumann
There is little point in being exact when you are unaware of the topic.
2.
I'm doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the experiment?
Lewis Carroll
3.
For many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
Joseph M. Juran
5.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
Alan Turing
7.
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
Edsger Dijkstra
8.
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
Linus Torvalds
9.
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
Alan Kay
10.
Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
Niklaus Wirth
11.
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)
Eric S. Raymond
12.
All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.
George Bernard Shaw
13.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
Donald Knuth
16.
There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection.
Rob Pike
20.
The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there.
Gordon Bell
23.
I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
Ray Bradbury
24.
Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end.
Khalil Gibran
25.
Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
Tony Hoare
26.
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
Nicholas Negroponte
27.
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
Stephen Hawking
28.
The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.
Brian Kernighan
29.
There was something amazingly enticing about programming.
Vinton Cerf
30.
The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity.
Tony Hoare
31.
Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
Jakob Nielsen
32.
The greatest single programming language ever designed
Alan Kay
33.
If you think something is impossible, don't disturb the person who is doing it!
Amar Bose
34.
I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
Alan Kay
35.
Testing is not the point. The point is about responsibility.
Kent Beck
36.
In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.
Maimonides
39.
If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
Ken Thompson
40.
Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.
Amar Bose
41.
The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.
Ronald Fisher
42.
Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material.
Alan Kay
43.
Never hesitate to ask a lesser person.
Confucius
44.
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself.
Ken Thompson
46.
Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.
Douglas Crockford
48.
Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick
Charles Petzold
49.
If you don’t take responsibility for programming yourself, then someone else will.
Paul McKenna