wall of techies

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

— Donald Knuth

"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."

— Ken Thompson

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

— Alan Kay

"Make it work, make it right, make it fast."

— Kent Beck

"Software is eating the world."

— Marc Andreessen

"The most dangerous phrase in the language is: we've always done it this way."

— Grace Hopper

"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."

— Tony Hoare

"I know it doesn't sound like a big effort, but programmers are really, really lazy, and they like to minimize motion."

— Steve Yegge

"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it."

— Dennis Ritchie

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

— Bjarne Stroustrup

"Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need."

— Guido van Rossum

"The whole point of engineering is to make things simple."

— James Gosling

"There's more than one way to do it."

— Larry Wall

"The Web does not just connect machines, it connects people."

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Niklaus Wirth

"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."

— Alan Turing

"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price."

— Richard Stallman

"Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do."

— John Carmack

"If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it."

— Paul Graham

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

— Martin Fowler

"Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares."

— Robert C. Martin

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place."

— Brian Kernighan

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

— Andrew Tanenbaum

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."

— Fred Brooks

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

— Richard Hamming

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."

— John von Neumann

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything."

— Ada Lovelace

"The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."

— Vint Cerf

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."

— Steve Wozniak

"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

— Ward Cunningham

"Simplicity is not removing complexity, it's solving it."

— David Heinemeier Hansson

"I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming."

— Yukihiro Matsumoto

"JavaScript is the world's most misunderstood programming language."

— Douglas Crockford

"Always bet on JavaScript."

— Brendan Eich

"No exponential is forever."

— Gordon Moore

"Optimism is a necessity for innovation."

— Robert Noyce

"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."

— Eric S. Raymond

"Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable."

— Ralph Johnson

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

— Rick Cook

"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

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

— Richard Pattis

"As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow."

— Doug McIlroy

"Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it's bad."

— Jeff Atwood

"Programming isn't about what you know; it's about what you can figure out."

— Chris Pine

"Writing a class without its contract is like producing an engineering component without a spec."

— Bertrand Meyer

"To iterate is human, to recurse divine."

— L. Peter Deutsch

"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."

— Seymour Cray

"The only programs that don't get changed are those that are so bad that nobody wants to use them."

— David Parnas

"Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them."

— Ron Jeffries

"In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them."

— Andrew Hunt

"Fix the cause, not the symptom."

— Steve Maguire

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

— John Backus

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."

— Dan Salomon

"Information is power."

— Aaron Swartz

"The best error message is the one that never shows up."

— Thomas Fuchs

"If the code and comments do not match, possibly both are incorrect."

— Norm Schryer

"System programmers are the high priests of a low cult."

— Robert S. Barton

"Information is the resolution of uncertainty."

— Claude Shannon

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way."

— Marvin Minsky

"You can't think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something."

— Seymour Papert

"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."

— Charles Babbage

"There was no choice but to be pioneers."

— Margaret Hamilton

"Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees for the present."

— Hedy Lamarr

"The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there."

— Gordon Bell

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems."

— Jamie Zawinski

"Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works."

— Michael Hartung

"Technology is best when it brings people together."

— Matt Mullenweg

"Life is too short to do something that doesn't matter."

— Drew Houston

"It's better to make friends than to make money."

— Stewart Butterfield

"Focus on what you want to do, and make time for it."

— Jack Dorsey

"No one is in charge of your happiness but you."

— Marissa Mayer

"Some people are good programmers because they can handle many more details than most people."

— Butler Lampson

"People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years."

— J. C. R. Licklider

"Only the paranoid survive."

— Andy Grove

"The digital revolution is more important than any other in the history of mankind."

— Doug Engelbart

"The future is going to be very surprising and very different from today."

— Ray Kurzweil

"Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant."

— Mitch Kapor

"Good code is its own best documentation."

— Steve McConnell

"Legacy code is simply code without tests."

— Michael Feathers

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies, or so complicated there are no obvious deficiencies."

— Alan Perlis

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."

— Gerald Weinberg

"You cannot control what you cannot measure."

— Tom DeMarco

"Complexity is anything that makes software hard to understand or modify."

— John Ousterhout

"Programming is not about typing, it's about thinking."

— Rich Hickey

"In software, the most beautiful code, functions, and programs are sometimes not there at all."

— Jon Bentley

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

— Grace Hopper

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad."

— Shigeru Miyamoto

"A game is a series of interesting choices."

— Sid Meier

"If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach."

— Steve Wozniak

"First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."

— John Johnson

"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."

— Edward V. Berard

"Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems."

— Sergey Brin

"Java is to JavaScript what car is to carpet."

— Chris Heilmann

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

— Dennis Ritchie

"When in doubt, use brute force."

— Ken Thompson

"Don't write better error messages, write code that doesn't need them."

— Jason C. McDonald

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

— Alan Kay

"It's less Iron Man robots and more Iron Man suits that you want to build."

— Andrej Karpathy