What's your favourite quote about programming? [closed]

Question

What's your favourite quote about programming?

One quote per answer, and please check for duplicates before posting!

Answer 1

Relationship between length and quality

If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.
  — Mark Twain

The shortest version:

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
  — Marcus T. Cicero

The near-perfectionist's version:

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
  — Karl Friedrich Gauss

Several more discuss this concept from various angles.

Answer 2

Crockford is the sole user of the super-strict equality operator (====), which either returns true or kicks you in the balls.

Answer 3

Not really a programming quote, more of an IT one, but one that my A-Level IT teacher drummed into me aged 16:

Typing is no substitute for Thinking

Answer 4

A good algorithm is like a sharp knife - it does exactly what it is supposed to do with a minimum amount of applied effort. Using the wrong algorithm to solve a problem is trying to cut a steak with a screwdriver: you may eventually get a digestible result, but you will expend considerable more effort than necessary, and the result is unlikely to be aesthetically pleasing.

Answer 5

Open source is free only if your time costs nothing

Heard it from a guy I worked with. Don't know who came up with this.

Answer 6

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
  — Pablo Picasso

Answer 7

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one. - Bill Gates

The problem with quick and dirty...is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten. - Steve C McConnell

My site SoftwareQuotes.com is full of quotations about programming and software development.

Answer 8

Answer 9

A normal person believes a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a coder believes a kilometer is 1024 meters.

-Unknown

Answer 10

C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.

Answer 11

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

Nathaniel Borenstein

Answer 12

A few months writing code can save you a few hours in design.

Which is modified from:

A few months in the laboratory can save you a few hours in the library.

Answer 13

... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.

-- Robert Firth

Answer 14

Why fix an old bug if you can write three new ones in the same time?

— David Kastrup

Answer 15

Quoting Kent Beck:

Make It Work
Make It Right
Make It Fast

Answer 16

Anyone attempting to produce random numbers by purely arithmetic means is, of course, in a state of sin.
  — John von Neumann

Answer 17

Real Programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
  — Tom Van Vleck

Answer 18

Those who try to build idiot-proof systems always underestimate the persistence and ingenuity of idiots.

— Anon

Answer 19

One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions.

Admiral Grace Hopper

Answer 20

I am one of those culprits who created the problem. I used to write those programs back in the '60s and '70s, and was so proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space by not having to put '19' before the year.

-- Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chair

Answer 21

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity—in short: what mathematicians call "elegance"—are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Answer 22

A beautiful program is like a beautiful theorem: It does the job elegantly. It has a simple and perspicuous structure; people say, “Oh, yes. I see that’s the way to do it.”

-- Butler Lampson

Answer 23

Every time I ask developers why their shiny new C# .NET version isn't nearly as fast and smooth as the old C/C++ version, I'm thinking of:

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
  — Henry Petroski

But they just tell me to shut up while they plaster on yet another level of abstraction...

Answer 24

Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Answer 25

"The complexity you remove can never fail" -- Burt Rutan on the Ansari X Prize

Answer 26

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

Doug Horton

Answer 27

The best code is no code at all

Answer 28

"It worked on MY computer!" -anon

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." - Abelson and Sussman, from "The structure and interpretation of computer programs"

Answer 29

Programmers are optimists by nature, they also have a keen eye for the downside. A hyperactive imagination for disaster scenarios is a professional asset; they have to think through everything that can go wrong in order to practice their craft.

-- Scott Rosenberg

Answer 30

It's not about programming per se, but by a famous programmer:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  — Alan Kay

Which is usually a good thing to remind myself to get moving and do things.