101 Great Computer Programming Quotes Computers 1. “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” (Pablo Picasso) 2. “Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.” (Sam Ewing) 3. “They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.” (Janet Reno) 4. “That’s what’s cool about working with computers. They don’t argue, they remember everything, and they don’t drink all your beer.” (Paul Leary) 5. “If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.” (Robert X. Cringely) Computer Intelligence 6. “Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by ‘they’, I mean ‘computers’. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)” (Dave Barry) 7. “I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS.” (Larry DeLuca) 8. “The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.” (Edsger W. Dijkstra) 9. “It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is Page 1 of 12 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes really becoming more obsolete every minute.” (Marvin Minsky) Trust 10. “The city’s central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!” (C3PO) 11. “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” (Steve Wozniak) Hardware 12. “Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked.” (Jeff Pesis) Software 13. “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) 14. “I’ve finally learned what ‘upward compatible’ means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes.” (Dennie van Tassel) Operating Systems 15. “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) 16. “19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM” (End of the word according to Unix–2^32 seconds after January 1, 1970) Page 2 of 12 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes 17. “Every operating system out there is about equal… We all suck.” (Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine describing the state of the art in OS security, 2003) 18. “Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the ‘ most reliable Windows ever. ‘ To me, this is like saying that asparagus is ‘ the most articulate vegetable ever. ‘ “ (Dave Barry) Internet 19. “The Internet? Is that thing still around?” (Homer Simpson) 20. “The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit.” (Nytwind) 21. “Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare.” (Blair Houghton) Software Industry 22. “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) 23. “True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it.” (Timm Martin) 24. “It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.” (Alan Cooper) 25. “It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins.” Page 3 of 12 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes (Lou Gerstner) 26. “We are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated.” (Bumper sticker) Software Demos 27. “No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.” (Mark Gibbs) Software Patents 28. “The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It’s up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.” (Linus Torvalds) Complexity 29. “Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.” (Brian Kernigan) 30. “Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.” (Ray Ozzie) 31. “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) 32. “The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.” (Grady Booch) Page 4 of 12 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes Ease of Use 33. “Just remember: you’re not a ‘dummy,’ no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who–though technically expert–couldn’t design hardware and software that’s usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it.” (Walter Mossberg) 34. “Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more ‘user-friendly’… Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words ‘user-friendly’ on the cover.” (Bill Gates) 35. “There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.” (Bjarne Stroustrup) Users 36. “Any fool can use a computer. Many do.” (Ted Nelson) 37. “There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’.” (Edward Tufte) Programmers 38. “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) 39. “Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” (Larry Wall) 40. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” Page 5 of 12 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes (Seymour Cray) 41. “That’s the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.” (Larry Niven) 42. “For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that 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) 43. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.” (Eric Raymond) 44. “A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place.” (IEEE Grid newsmagazine) 45. “A hacker on a roll may be able to produce–in a period of a few months– something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more.” (Peter Seebach) 46. “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) 47. “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 Page 6 of 12 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes the price of an average software writer.” (Bill Gates) 48. “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) 49. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” (Bill Gates) 50. “Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing.” (Gerald Weinberg) 51. “First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.” (George Carrette) 52. “First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.” (John Johnson) 53. “Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.” (Kent Beck) 54. “To iterate is human, to recurse divine.” (L. Peter Deutsch) 55. “The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.” (Anonymous) 56.