“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.”

- Phil Karlton

“It is economically better for most organizations to conserve programmer cycles than computer cycles.”

- Robert C. Martin

Clean Code Q&A

“One should not first make the program and then prove its correctness, because then the requirement of providing the proof would only increase the poor programmer’s burden. On the contrary: the programmer should let correctness proof and program grow hand in hand.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

The Humble Programmer

“Methods should have verb or verb phrase.”

- Robert C. Martin

“Classes and objects should have noun or noun phrase names.”

- Robert C. Martin

“Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

“Engineers have to be challenged and if they're not challenged with the business problem, they're going to challenge themselves with technical problems.”

- Vaughn Vernon

“Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling --- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.”

- Niklaus Wirth

“Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.”

- Bertrand Meyer

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

“A good way to stay flexible is to write less code.”

- Andy Hunt

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

- Fred Brooks

“Inside every large program, there is a small program trying to get out.”

- C.A.R. Hoare

“Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”

- Bjarne Stroustrup

“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.”

- Ralph Johnson

“It's OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn't need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.”

- Steve McConnell

“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

“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

- Donald Knuth

“A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.”

- Niklaus Wirth

“Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later!”

- Fred Brooks

“Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often.”

- Steve McConnell

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it .”

- Donald Knuth

“When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.”

- Richard Pattis

“Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.”

- Linus Torvald

“If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code account for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

- Tom Cargill

“Nine people can't make a baby in a month.”

- Fred Brooks

The Mythical Man-Month

“Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer? Bill Gates: No. the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written.”

- Bill Gates

“The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

- Donald Knuth

“Make it work, make it right, make it fast”

- Kent Beck

“The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it's going to run. And if it doesn't, it'll be easy to make it fast.”

- Joshua Bloch

“Clarity and brevity sometimes are at odds. When they are, I choose clarity.”

- Jacob Kaplan-Moss

“These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.”

- Donald Knuth

“Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it or him.”

- Captain Spock

“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”

- Donald Knuth

“SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.”

- Philip Greenspun

“Languages shape the way we think, or don't.”

- Erik Naggum

“A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”

- Alan J. Perlis

“To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.”

- Grace Hopper

“Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.”

- Brian Kernigan

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”

- Martin Golding

“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”

- Albert Einstein

“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

“Domain experts should object to terms or structures that are awkward or inadequate to convey domain understanding; developers should watch for ambiguity or inconsistency that will trip up design.”

- Eric Evans

“Avoid mental mapping when naming methods, classes or variables. ”

- Robert C. Martin

“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

- Harold "Hal" Abelson

“[T]he difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

- Linus Torvald

“When you feel the need to write a comment, first try to refactor the code so that any comment becomes superfluous.”

- Martin Fowler

“DevOps is "a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.”

- Jez Humble

“I call [the invention of the null reference] my billion-dollar mistake.”

- Tony Hoare

“Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”

- Edsger W. Dijkstra

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

- Martin Fowler