Programmers Quotes - Page 7

• Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to.

  Sherry Turkle

  Real, Color, Law

  Sherry Turkle (2005). “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit”, p.69, MIT Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.

  Joseph Weizenbaum

  Technology, Computer, Responsible

  52 Copy quote

• Most of the programmers in ten years will be us, and we won't get much smarter.

  Bjarne Stroustrup

  Science, Years, Mathematics

  8 Copy quote

• Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results

  Brian Eno

  Roles, Littles, Results

  8 Copy quote

• When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.

  Patricia Cornwell

  College, Two, Funeral

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.

  Robert W. Floyd

  Wise, Struggle, Past

  11 Copy quote

• Some compilers allow a check during execution that subscripts do not exceed array dimensions. This is a help, but not sufficient. First, many programmers do not use such compilers because They're not efficient. (Presumably, this means that it is vital to get the wrong answers quickly.)

  Brian Kernighan

  Mean, Firsts, Dimensions

  Brian W. Kernighan, P. J. Plauger (1978). “The Elements of Programming Style”, Computing McGraw-Hill

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• GOTO, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.

  Raymond Simard

  Complaining, Tools, Computer

  4 Copy quote

• Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

  John Carmack

  Self, Mojave, Desert

  John Carmack's plan of Quake 3 Arena Project, www.bluesnews.com. May 15, 2000.

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

  Ellen Ullman

  Lying, Ignorance, Sea

  Ellen Ullman (2012). “Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents”, p.110, Macmillan

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

  Paul Vixie

  Plato, Real, Errors

  6 Copy quote

• When we look at these historical women and what they've gone through, it's shocking to recognize some of our own experiences in theirs. When you look at someone like Ada Lovelace who is the first computer programmer, during her lifetime doctors said that was really sick because she was trying to use a masculine kind of brain that she didn't have. Today, her legacy of being the first programmer is stil disputed.

  Anita Sarkeesian

  Doctors, Sick, Historical

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

  Maurice Wilkes

  Mistake, Coders, Debugging

  Lecture titled "The Design and Use of the EDSAC" delivered by Maurice Wilkes at the Digital Computer Museum, tcm.computerhistory.org. September 23, 1979.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Character, Six, Onions

  8 Copy quote

• The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Clever, Humility, Skulls

  "The humble programmer" by Edsger Dijkstra in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 15, Issue 10 (pp. 859-866), dl.acm.org. October 1972.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

  Tom Van Vleck

  Real, Writing, Cobol

  4 Copy quote

• Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule.

  Damian Conway

  Art, Fighting, Dark

  6 Copy quote

• Labor-rich manufacturing doesn't exist anymore. Manufacturing jobs are white-collar, Silicon Valley programmers or highly-skilled technicians. They are not going to employ lots of people.

  David Brooks

  Jobs, White, People

  "Brooks and Dionne on the GOP's dilemma and the role of 'common decency' in the campaign". "PBS NewsHour" with Judy Woodruff, www.pbs.org. August 12, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.

  Jeff Atwood

  Computer, Programming, Software Engineering

  6 Copy quote

• Most kids are not dreaming of being programmers, scientists or engineers.

  will.i.am

  Dream, Kids, Scientist

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  Talking, People, Hackers

  4 Copy quote

• There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. [...] The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.

  Joel Spolsky

  Writing, Thinking, Law

  Joel Spolsky (2004). “Joel on Software”, p.184, Apress

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.

  Michael Crichton

  Jobs, Writing, Young

  Michael Crichton (2002). “Prey”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Thinking, Ideas, Apples

  "Chris Parnell on Farrah Fawcett and being mistaken for Chris Kattan". Interview with Marah Eakin, tv.avclub.com. September 11, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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 Knuth

  Machines, Algorithms, Way

  23 Copy quote