Programming quotes

Here are some amazing quotes about programming and software development to inspire you, make you laugh, or make you think.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Edsger Dijkstra

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Linus Torvalds

Java is to JavaScript what Car is to Carpet.

Chris Heilmann

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Brian Kernighan

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

Donald Knuth

It’s not a bug; it’s an undocumented feature.

Anonymous

Programming in different languages is like composing pieces in different keys, particularly if you work at the keyboard. If you have learned or written pieces in many keys, each key will have its own special emotional aura.

Douglas Hofstadter

End-to-End encryption is practically a meaningless phrase used by internet-based companies to coax people into believing the modern myth of online privacy.

Abhijit Naskar

What I love about both programming and music is that they enable you to build incredibly creative, complex, and beneficial things seemingly from thin air no additional materials required, just your brain and a keyboard in front of you. Programming and music also both allow for a deep, single-minded immersion in the creative process. They require you to be deeply focused and in the moment for everything to work well, and I find that state of flow to be immensely satisfying.

Peter Borum

Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.

Sam Ewing

That’s what’s cool about working with computers. They don’t argue, they remember everything, and they don’t drink all your beer.

Paul Leary

I’ve finally learned what ‘upward compatible’ means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.

Dennie van Tassel

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.

Jeremy S. Anderson

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Larry Wall

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.

Seymour Cray

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

Bill Gates

First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.

George Carrette

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.

Bjarne Stroustrup

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.

Jon Ribbens

I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing.

Oktal

Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is.

Larry Wall