Quotations about Programming

(Note: the categories got messed up, so these results may be
temporarily off, probably in an amusing manner...)

16 Quotes Found

"Programming the X Windows System is like trying to find the square root of pi using Roman numerals."
	-Anonymous
"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
	-Abelson & Sussman, in SICP, preface to the first edition
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
	-George Boole, Mathematician, logician, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming."
	-Donald Knuth
"the greatest single programming language ever designed"
	-Alan Kay, on Lisp
"One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented."
	-Douglas Hofstadter, Writer, in Godel, Escher, Bach
"Lisp is a programmable programming language."
	-John Foderaro, in CACM, September 1991
"One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage."
	-John McCarthy, in "Early History of Lisp"
"I object to doing things that computers can do."
	-Olin Shivers
"Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew."
	-Peter Landin, (paraphrase - exact quote unknown)
"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it."
	-Kernighan and Ritchie
"If I had a nickel for every time I've written 'for (i = 0; i < N; i++)' in C I'd be a millionaire."
	-Mike Vanier
"Language designers are not intellectuals. They're not as interested in thinking as you might hope. They just want to get a language done and start using it."
	-Dave Moon
"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."
	-Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
"The CRM-114 Discriminator is designed not to receive at all. That is, not unless the message is preceded by the proper 3-letter code group."
	-George C. Scott, in "Dr. Strangelove", as Gen. Buck Turgidson
"C views the entire world as if your only tool is a hammer. CRM views the world as if your only good tools are a set of scissors and a roll of sticky splicing tape."
	-Anonymous