50 Best Curated Programming Quotes

50 Best Curated Programming Quotes

·

7 min read

  1. “Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.” - Cory House

  2. “So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.” — Ryan Singer

  3. “Programming is 10% science, 20% ingenuity, and 70% getting the ingenuity to work with the science.” — Unknown

  4. “It is better to do the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.” — Richard Hamming

  5. “UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.” — Dennis Ritchie

  6. “One irresponsible programmer can keep any five top-notch programmers busy.” — Eric Evans

  7. “So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.” — Ryan Singer

  8. “Remember, good code is like a good joke: It needs no explanation.” — Unknown

  9. “Inside every well-written large program is a well-written small program.” — C. A. R. Hoare

  10. “Coding isn’t the poor handmaiden of design or analysis. Coding is where your fuzzy ideas awaken in the harsh dawn of reality.” — Kent Beck
  11. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late” — Seymour Cray
  12. "Errors should never pass silently, unless explicitly silenced." -Tim Peters (The Zen of Python)
  13. "To be a programmer long term, you have to love change. You can't just tolerate it, you have to love it"
  14. "Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out.” - Chris Pine
  15. "Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding." - Burt Rutan
  16. "The best error message is the one that never shows up." - Thomas Fuchs
  17. “The most damaging phrase in the language is.. it's always been done this way” - Grace Hopper
  18. "Don't write better error messages, write code that doesn't need them." - Jason C. McDonald
  19. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” ― Martin Fowler
  20. “How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it” ― Rasheed Ogunlaru
  21. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” ― Edward V. Berard
  22. “Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”― Paul Graham
  23. “If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.” ― Donald Knuth
  24. “Code is read more than it is written.” ― Daniel Roy Greenfeld, Audrey Roy Greenfeld
  25. “It's not a bug; it's an undocumented feature.”― Anonymous
  26. “Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.” - Brian Kernigan
  27. “The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.” - Grady Booch
  28. “Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.” - Mosher’s Law of Software Engineering
  29. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”-Bill Gates
  30. “First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.” - John Johnson
  31. “The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.” - Anonymous
  32. “Good code is its own best documentation.” - Steve McConnell
  33. “Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.” - Eagleson’s Law
  34. “Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case.” - Francis Glassborow
  35. “Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline.” - Bill Clinton
  36. “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are–by definition–not smart enough to debug it.” - Brian Kernighan
  37. “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” - Edsger W. Dijkstra
  38. “I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!” - Vidiu Platon
  39. “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” - Charles H. Duell
  40. “Coding is not just code, that is a live thing to serve everyone!” ― Ming Song
  41. “User interface is the process of shifting from chaotic complexity to elegant simplicity.” ― Akshat Paul
  42. “Abstraction is the elimination of the irrelevant and the amplification of the essential.” ― Robert C. Martin
  43. “Write a program in efficient way as you write for kernel scheduler” ― Ahmad Moawad
  44. “The happiest moment i felt; is that moment when i realized my ability to create.” ― Dr. Hazem Ali
  45. “Think twice, code once.” ― Waseem Latif
  46. “Without requirements and design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.” ― Louis Srygley
  47. “Every programmer is an author.” ― Sercan Leylek
  48. “Programming is breaking of one big impossible task into several very small possible tasks.” ― Jazzwant
  49. “Think like a fundamentalist, code like a hacker.” ― Erik Meijer
  50. “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra