1.

“You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative
profession. It's logic-based creativity.”- John Romero

2. "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-
proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."-
Rick Cook

3. “ It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've
assumed your code is error-free.”- Steve McConnell

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 Kernighan

5. “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how
to think.”- Steve Jobs

6. "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true
because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone."- Bjarne Stroustrup

7. “The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs and to study great programs that
other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and
fished out listings of their operating system.”- Bill Gates

8. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by
weight.”- Bill Gates

9. “The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.”- (Anonymous)

10. “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,
Selected Papers on Computer Science

11. “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

12. “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

13. “A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying a phonograph first and then a violin. The
latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our
computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t
fl exible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter until you learn how to use it.”- Marvin Minsky

14. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that
humans can understand.”- Martin Fowler

15. “A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.”-
Doug Linder

16. “Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it’s released. Beta is Latin for ‘still doesn’t work.’”
(Anonymous)

17. “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

18. We are looking at a society increasingly dependent on machines, yet decreasingly capable of making
or even using them effectively.”- Douglas Rushkoff

19. “Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of
their case analysis.”- Alan J. Perlis

20. “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”- Alan Kay