The vast majority of the programming quotes I’ve gathered are made by a portion of the well known names in the business, while others are originated from not really acclaimed individuals. And also they are all witty so I trust you will find them captivating and edifying.
As Bill Gates once said, PCs have undoubtedly turned into our silicon experts, swarming almost every part of our cutting edge lives. Therefore, a portion of the best personalities of our time have considered the essentials of PCs and programming in our human life.
Hence, the following mentioned are few top quotes on programming and coding.
Best Programming Quotes of all Time:
2. “Java is to JavaScript what Car is to Carpet.”- Chris Heilmann
3. “Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.” – Alan Kay
4. “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 W. Kernighan
5. The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit. – Anonymous
6. The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language. – Donald Knuth
7. “Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.” – Rich Cook
8. “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”
– C.A.R. Hoare
9. “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” ― Harold Abelson
10. “If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.” – Edsger Dijkstra
11. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”- Edward V Berard
12. Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. – Louis Srygley
13. “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” – Edsger Dijkstra
14. “Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” – Larry Wall
15. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”– Bill Gates
16. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” ― Rick Cook
17. “ Rules of Optimization:
Rule 1: Don’t do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet. ” – Michael A. Jackson
18. “They don’t make bugs like Bunny anymore.”- Olav Mjelde
19. Ready, fire, aim: the fast approach to software development. Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim: the slow approach to software development. – Anonymous
20. “Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.” – Donald Knuth
21. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” – Seymour Cray
22. . “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 W. Kernighan
23. “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live” ― John Woods
24. “ Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. ” – Edward V Berard
25. “A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.”- Alan J. Perlis
26. “It’s not a bug – it’s an undocumented feature.” – Anonymous
27. “You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It’s logic-based creativity.” – John Romero
28. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.” – Eric Raymond
29. “C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.”– Bjarne Stroustrup
30. “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 Ervin Knuth
31. “ 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
32. “A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors.”- Waldi Ravens
33. A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. – Doug Linder
34. If you think about computer programming, it’s as antisocial as it gets. – Shawn Fanning
35. “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.” – Randall E. Stross
36. “When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.”
– Richard Pattis
37. “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.” ― Kent Beck
38. “ It’s not at all important to get it right the first time. It’s vitally important to get it right the last time. ” – Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
39. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.” – Eric S. Raymond
40. “Deleted code is debugged code.” – Jeff Sickel
41. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” — Edward V Berard
42. “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding
43. “Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.” – John Carmack
44. “A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” – Bill Gates
45. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.” – Eric S. Raymond
46. “Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day.
Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.” ― Waseem Latif
47. “ First, solve the problem. Then, write the code. ” – John Johnson
48. “Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN’T be like.”
– pixadel
49. “ Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. ” – Stan Kelly-Bootle
50. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. — Hofstadter’s Law
51. “ Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. ” – Rick Osborne
52. Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. – Michael Sinz
53. “ Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. ” – Martin Fowler
54. “Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.” – Marissa Mayer
55. “ Software sucks because users demand it to. ” – Nathan Myhrvold
56. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” – Bill Gates
57. “ Linux is only free if your time has no value. ” – Jamie Zawinski
58. “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”– Linus Torvalds
59. “ Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. ”
– Donald Knuth
60. “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 W. Kernighan
61. “ There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code. ” – Flon’s Law
62. “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
63. “ The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. ”
– Tom Cargill
64. Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. — Rick Osborne
65. “ Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, “How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?” Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer. ” – Steve McConnell
66. “Deleted code is debugged code.” – Jeff Sickel
67. “ Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. ” – Abelson
68. “Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.” – Stewart Alsop
69. “ Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. ” – Alan Kay
70. “Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing.” – Gerald Weinberg
71. “ Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined. ” – Kreitzberg and Shneiderman
72. “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.” ― Alan J. Perlis
73. “ Copy and paste is a design error. ” – David Parnas
74. “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense.”- E.W. Dijkstra
75. “ Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable. ” – Ralph Johnson
76. “ Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. ” – Louis Srygley
77. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it’s released. Beta is Latin for “still doesn’t work. – Anonymous
78. “ When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop. ” – Alan Perlis
79. Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. – Edsger Dijkstra
80. “ Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.
– Donald Knuth
81. “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.” – George Carrette
82. “ 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
83. “Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, ‘How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?’”
– Steve McConnell
84. “On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
― Charles Babbage
85. “Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.”- Thomas C. Gale
86. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.— Jamie Zawinski
87. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning. – Rick Cook
88. “APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.” – Edsger Dijkstra
89. “The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.”
– Anonymous
90. “The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.” ― Joseph Weizenbaum
91. “Python’s a drop-in replacement for BASIC in the sense that Optimus Prime is a drop-in replacement for a truck.”- Cory Dodt
92. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”— Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
93. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.” – Rick Cook
94. “The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it’s a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.” – Charles R. Swindoll
95. “There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
96. . “One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.” – Ken Thompson
97. “Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” ― Edward Berard
98. “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”- Linus Torvalds
99. “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
100. “Our ultimate goal is extensible programming (EP). By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system.” – Niklaus Wirth
101. “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
102. “Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
― Keith Bostic
103. “Programming is like kicking yourself in the face, sooner or later your nose will bleed.”- Kyle Woodbury
104. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” — Bill Gates
105. “It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite
106. “I’ve been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.” – Masi Oka
107. “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along wound destroy civilization.” – Gerald Weinberg
108. “The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.” ― Alan Kay
109. “There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.” — Leon Bambrick
110. “There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
111. “We still have a tradition certainly in English television; it’s faded a bit in the last five years, but we still have a tradition where the important thing is the quality and the challenging nature of the programming.” – Rowan Atkinson
112. “I invented the term ‘Object-Oriented’, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.”- Alan Kay
113. “The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user.” ― C.A.R. Hoare
114. “Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.” — Fred Brooks
115. The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there. – Gordon Bell
116. “I never really had the fun teens of exploring the world because I was sitting at home, learning programming.” – Markus Persson
117. “Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry”- Ted Nelson
118. “Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.” ― Paul Graham
119. “Debuggers don’t remove bugs. They only show them in slow motion.” — Unknown
120. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” – Seymour Cray
121. Digitisation will rather consolidate the broadcasting industry in India because once the cable is digitized, then naturally all the programmers can showcase their programming. – Subhash Chandra
122. “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”- Randall E. Stross
123. “We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making or even using them effectively.” ― Douglas Rushkoff
124. The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.— Tom Cargill
125. “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
126. “Marketing is the obverse of programming.” – John McAfee
127. “At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.” ― Michael Crichton
128. “If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.” — Robert Sewell
129. “Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.” – Niklaus Wirth
130. “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”- Donald E. Knuth.
131. “Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle.” ― Vernor Vinge
132. “On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” — Charles Babbage
133. “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.” – Linus Torvalds
134. “Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.”- Christopher Thompson
135. “Some of the best programming is done on paper, really. Putting it into the computer is just a minor detail.” ― Max Kanat-Alexander
136. “It’s all talk until the code runs.” — Ward Cunningham
137. “When I’m 18, I can finally order that paid programming stuff on TV. Like it always says, ‘Must be 18 or older to call,’ so I’ll be able to call! I can finally buy some blenders from the TV.” – Austin Mahone
138. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”- Bill Gates
139. “Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.” ― Alan J. Perlis
140. “Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom – you never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests.” — Ryan Campbell
141. “Proprietary programming like news can be a great weapon.” – Alan Gerry
142. “I didn’t get trained by the school system like other kids, and when I did concentrate on learning, my mind was cluttered and locked by the programming of the system.” – Huey Newton
143. “What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people – ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.” – Larry Ellison
144. “Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.” – Edsger Dijkstra
145. “Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code. ” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra
146. “Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
147. “The kind of programming that C provides will probably remain similar absolutely or slowly decline in usage, but relatively, JavaScript or its variants, or XML, will continue to become more central.” – Dennis Ritchie
148. “I have been wildly enthused about gaming since I was younger, and a career path I chose not to go down but did really consider was getting into programming and game design.” – Trent Reznor
149. “Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant
to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap
bubble?” ― Alan J. Perlis
150. Being a good software engineer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet.— Unknown
151. “When The Muppet Show ended, we all sat around and said, what kind of television show would we like to do. We felt the need these days are for some quality children’s programming.” – Jim Henson
152. “What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she’ll get complex software right the first time?” ― James Alan Gardner
153. “If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.” — John Carmack
154. “Pretty much all the programming on our CDs is done by me personally, so I’ve kind of been able to have complete control of what sounds I’m looking for to complete a song.” – Tyler Joseph
155. “The issue of finding the best possible answer or achieving maximum efficiency usually arises in industry only after serious performance or legal troubles.” ― Steven S. Skiena
156. “All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection… Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.” — David Wheeler
157. “We spend too much time fretting over the way the industry produces programming, and too little worrying about the way the public consumes it.” – Michael Medved
158. “What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it that you can make it more.” ― Alan J. Perlis
159. “Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra
160. “Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can, because I’m in it for the love of programming.” – John Carmack
161. “Programming isn’t about what you know; i’s about what you can figure out.”
― Chris Pine
162. I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!
– Vidiu Platon
163. “On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries – without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees.” – Marc Andreessen
164. “Any nerd who grew up around the time that I did, BBC programming was a treasure chest for us.” – Chris Hardwick
165. “Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.”
– Alan Perlis
166. “Whether you’re a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place.” – Justin Rosenstein
167. “Write a program in efficient way as you write for kernel scheduler” ― Ahmad Moawad
168. “Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, ‘How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?’ Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.” – Steve McConnell
169. “We already have a professor who’s using an online social network of MIT alums to help educate students in programming. Just imagine expanding that in Facebook-fashion to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world.” – Anant Agarwal
170. “That doesn’t upset too many people, but the fact that accessibility restrictions don’t enter into the picture has caused more than one otherwise pacifistic soul to contemplate distinctly unpacifistic actions.” ― Scott Meyers
171. “A programmer is a device for turning caffeine into code.”
172. “Ads featuring real women and real beauty are such a necessary component to offset the potentially dangerous programming out there for little girls.” – Rashida Jones
173. “The happiest moment i felt; is that moment when i realized my ability to create.”
― Dr. Hazem Ali
174. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” – Martin Fowler
175. “I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.” – Maya Lin
176. “Children’s programming in America, I think it’s pretty shoddy in terms of lack of diversity. It’s pretty much cartoons and Disney sort of shows. I don’t find any of that stimulating for children.” – Alex Kingston
