What's your favourite quote about programming?
One quote per answer, and please check for duplicates before posting!
166 Answers
There are 10 kinds of people in the world — those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Keep it simple, stupid!
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5No, it's a generally-applicable engineering principle. Commented Sep 13, 2010 at 0:01
Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.
— Stan Kelly-Bootle
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
— Albert Einstein
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Being a good software engineer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet.
— Unknown, appropriated
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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
If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.
— John Carmack
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Yep greatest quote I think so far, especially since Carmack showed multiple times (Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, etc) how to do it :)– NilsCommented Jan 20, 2011 at 10:03
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All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.
— David Wheeler
What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?
— Ward Cunningham
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I was once at a programming competition, and time was almost up, and we couldn't get our last program to compile. So, in desperation, we deleted the bits that wouldn't compile, and ran the program. And it worked. Perfectly. To this day I have no explanation for how this could be the case because, by our measure, the part that we deleted was the part that was supposed to be doing the work. Commented Jun 20, 2011 at 21:25
Testing can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
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
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3This quote is wrong. Just wrong. See web.morons.org/feature/rants/bsdlsd.jsp– imgx64Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 3:00
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2@Neil: "If 'accurate' isn't a requirement, I could write an arbitrarily great phrase," to paraphrase another quote. :)– Roger PateCommented Oct 11, 2010 at 16:08
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2@hasen j, Traditionally, pounds, shillings, and pence, but nowadays a hallucinogen.– TRiGCommented Dec 1, 2010 at 18:45
I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!
-- Vidiu Platon (whoever that is)
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Yeah, I've put this badge on at least one project: codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/… Commented Oct 13, 2010 at 23:49
When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail
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1Attributed to Abraham Maslow (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/…) Commented Sep 9, 2010 at 18:05
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This quote is true, but many times the converse is also true: until you have a hammer, nails are an unsolvable problem. Commented Dec 26, 2010 at 7:35
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Thanks @Mark C that worked, but now the program quits with no stacktrace... Commented Mar 5, 2011 at 8:13
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@Yar If enough of the nail is sticking out, you can pull it out with your pliers. Not all hammers have a notched end, and some nails can't be pulled out like that (so you need a nail pull).– Mark CCommented Mar 5, 2011 at 16:22
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
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
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history—with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
— Mitch Ratcliffe
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1I had a specific answer in mind for my bounty originally, but I discovered you can't apply them instantly! So I let it runs its course, and even though there's about a day left, this is my favorite answer from the past week. One I'd heard before, but never knew who said it. Thanks!– Roger PateCommented Oct 14, 2010 at 0:42
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@RogerP: What was your specific answer? Is it in the big thread?– Mark CCommented Oct 21, 2010 at 5:44
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@RogerP: You are too easy, trying to give bounties for answers you already know!– Mark CCommented Oct 21, 2010 at 6:29
A programmer is a device for turning caffeine into code.
(Not original to me, but associated with me through appearances on DotNetRocks etc. Lifted from a Usenet sig, I long ago forgot whose, which was no doubt inspired by Paul Erdos.)
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Erdõs -- indeed! My grandfather (who knew him!) was fond of the one about mathematicians and coffee. Commented Sep 23, 2010 at 17:54
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Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
Martin Fowler (in his book Refactoring)
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
— Donald Knuth
You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.
— Joe Armstrong on object-oriented programming
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The term 'OO' was invented by Smalltalkers, and Smalltalk runs on a VM and is often deployed as a VM image.– 9000Commented Dec 26, 2010 at 19:20
A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As he lay there in bed
Looping 'round in his head
was:while(!asleep()) sheep++;
Not quite a quote as such, but I little limerick I've always liked.
Source piercings - bash.org/?845468
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Limerick fans should also check out poetry.about.com/od/poetryplay/l/blwakawaka.htm– TylerCommented Jul 7, 2011 at 17:35
My old answer from SO:
If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
Another good website: "Quotes about Tech Writing"
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So you need code, comments, and something else? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_modular_redundancy Commented Dec 28, 2010 at 1:42
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
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4"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" — Larry Niven.– Joe DCommented Oct 24, 2010 at 16:26
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2"Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." (Can't remember.)– TRiGCommented Dec 1, 2010 at 18:53
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"Any sufficiently advanced being can distinguish technology from magic."– TimwiCommented Dec 26, 2010 at 13:03
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Any sufficiently advanced being cannot tell magic from technology.– AntsanCommented Jan 20, 2011 at 20:41
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2Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Commented Jan 27, 2011 at 21:56
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
-Richard Feynman (Rogers' Commission Report into the Challenger Crash, Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle)
More succinctly:
"You can't lie to the compiler."
-Andrew Stevenson
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...or at least if you do lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge. Commented Sep 12, 2010 at 22:40
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5That story still galls me. Imagine that, Dr. Richard Feynman, according to the book I read, had to threaten to withhold his signature unless his account of the accident was included in the official report. It was included as an appendix, so as to say, "The official investigation is over, and now here is some speculation from this eccentric."– Mark CCommented Sep 28, 2010 at 12:59
Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.
— Linus Torvalds
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9Can you split this in two different answers so that they can be voted independently?– Wizard79Commented Sep 2, 2010 at 7:36
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8The real question is, how did Linus come to find this out? Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 14:49
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@Stefano Palazzo: Read his autobiography "Just For Fun". Oh, and in case you meant the "sex is better when it's free"-part...ahm...that's OT here. ;)– BobbyCommented Oct 29, 2010 at 8:51
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On the seventh day, God said, "Ship it! We'll release patches later."
— Josh Flachsbart
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
— B. F. Skinner
Related more to AI than to simple programming, but I still like it.
The difficulty of a bug can be measured as the distance, in lines of code, from the cause of a bug to the visible symptom of a bug.
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The problem is that you don't know how difficult a bug is until you find it.– Mark CCommented Mar 2, 2011 at 21:39