Best Programming Quotes

“The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.”

— Alan Perlis

“You don't need to blame your parents for teaching you to be like them. What else could they teach you but what they know? They did the best they could, and if they abused you, it was due to their own domestication, their own fears, their own beliefs. They had no control over the programming they received, so they couldn't have behaved any differently.”

— Miguel Ruiz

“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

“I felt there was a need for us to build a new programming language. I also had come to see that Microsoft functions best when it controls its own destiny.”

— Anders Hejlsberg

“Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.”

— Nicholas Negroponte

“Worse and somehow embarrassing affair are "ghost" dreams, from which the dreamer only remembers fragments, and very short snippets of events, after which the next morning is left only a vague feeling of a messaged received. If the "ghost" is repeated several times, it is certain that it is a dream which is important for some reason. Then the dreamer, through concentration and auto-suggestion tries to force the dream again, this time a more specific "ghost". The best result are to force oneself to dream again immediately after waking up - called "hooking". If the dream does not produce a "hook" they try and produce a vision during one of the following session by concentration and meditation prior to going to sleep. Such pressure programming is called "anchoring".”

— Andrzej Sapkowski

“A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.”

— Raymond Simard

“What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea
into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?”

— Douglas Adams

“The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.”

— Alan Kay

“Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.”

— Alan Turing

“If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming.”

— George Dantzig

“Linear programming can be viewed as part of a great revolutionary development which has given mankind the ability to state general goals and to lay out a path of detailed decisions to take in order to "best" achieve its goals when faced with practical situations of great complexity.”

— George Dantzig

“The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it's true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.”

— Bill Joy

“Over the last 25 years, the American free enterprise system created the most diverse video programming on earth with the best value for the customer. It is disappointing that the updated report relies on assumptions that are not in line with the reality of the marketplace.”

— Kyle E. McSlarrow

“Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. Anything is possible, anything can happen. On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins marvelous patterns.”

— August Strindberg

“Amazon has included me in an opportunity to provide top-shelf television-style programming live on the world's computer screens. To hold forth with the industry's very best actors, directors, musicians, authors - I'm thrilled to be on the cutting edge of this.”

— Bill Maher

“When our goals are clearly defined and intelligently set, you have, in essence, taken a major step toward programming your left brain. That frees your right brain to be its creative best.”

— Zig Ziglar