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

There are 10 kinds of people in the world — those who understand binary and those who don't.

Answer 2

Keep it simple, stupid!

— The KISS principle

Answer 3

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
  — Stan Kelly-Bootle

Answer 4

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
  — Albert Einstein

Answer 5

Being a good software engineer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet.

— Unknown, appropriated

Answer 6

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
  — Bill Bryson

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

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

Answer 9

What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?

— Ward Cunningham

Answer 10

Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

Answer 11

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

Answer 12

I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!

-- Vidiu Platon (whoever that is)

Answer 13

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail

Answer 14

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

Answer 15

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.

— C.A.R. Hoare

Answer 16

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
  — Mitch Ratcliffe

Answer 17

A programmer is a device for turning caffeine into code.

(Not original to me, but associated with me through appearances on DotNetRocks etc. Lifted from a Usenet sig, I long ago forgot whose, which was no doubt inspired by Paul Erdos.)

Answer 18

There, it should work now.

— All programmers

Answer 19

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Martin Fowler (in his book Refactoring)

Answer 20

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
  — Donald Knuth

Answer 21

You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.
  — Joe Armstrong on object-oriented programming

Answer 22

A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;

Not quite a quote as such, but I little limerick I've always liked.

Source piercings - bash.org/?845468

Answer 23

My old answer from SO:

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.

Another good website: "Quotes about Tech Writing"

Answer 24

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

Answer 25

To understand recursion, you first need to understand recursion

Answer 26

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.

— Linus Torvalds

Answer 27

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

-Richard Feynman (Rogers' Commission Report into the Challenger Crash, Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle)

More succinctly:

"You can't lie to the compiler."

-Andrew Stevenson

Answer 28

On the seventh day, God said, "Ship it! We'll release patches later."
  — Josh Flachsbart

Answer 29

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

— B. F. Skinner

Related more to AI than to simple programming, but I still like it.

Answer 30

The difficulty of a bug can be measured as the distance, in lines of code, from the cause of a bug to the visible symptom of a bug.

The Klophaus Equation of Bug Difficulty