Favorite Programming Quotes

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Tom Cargill

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
Larry Wall

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

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 W. Kernighan

Once a new technology starts rolling, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
Stewart Brand

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

The hardest part of design … is keeping features out.
Donald Norman

Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
Ralph Johnson

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

Software and cathedrals are much the same - first we build them, then we pray.
Anonymous Preacher

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we’ve finished building it.
Anonymous Consultant

The software isn’t finished until the last user is dead.
Anonymous Support Group Member

Better train people and risk they leave - than do nothing and risk they stay.
Anonymous Technical Trainer

Programming is 10% science, 20% ingenuity, and 70% getting the ingenuity to work with the science.
Anonymous Scientist

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Anonymous Hack Actor

Bad code isn’t bad, its just misunderstood.
Anonymous Code Behaviorist

It is easier to measure something than to understand what you have measured.
Anonymous Analyst

The sooner you get behind in your work, the more time you have to catch up.
Anonymous Scheduler

When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple English, it will be discovered that programmers cannot speak English.
Anonymous Linguist

Benchmarks don’t lie, but liars do benchmarks.
Anonymous Tester

Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?
Anonymous Code Monkey