Programming Quotes

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)
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress. View quote
Alan Perlis
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. View quote
Alan Perlis
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages. View quote
Alan Perlis
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. View quote
Brian Kernighan
The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language. View quote
Donald Knuth
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples. View quote
Niklaus Wirth
Programming is usually taught by examples. View quote
Niklaus Wirth
But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs. (Niklaus Wirth)
Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated. View quote
Niklaus Wirth
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. View quote
Bjarne Stroustrup
Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for 'the average programmer', you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner. View quote
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. View quote
C. A. R. Hoare
A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. View quote
Paul Graham
Obviously with the onset of cable and satellite, there are more opportunities for programming and original programming, so it creates more opportunities for actors and producers and directors and everything. View quote
Anthony Michael Hall
The agendas on the management side of the table now are not in sync like they used to be because you have vastly different entities supplying programming to networks. View quote
Dick Wolf
If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets. View quote
Shawn Fanning
[A]ll the categories of creatures act individually as special-case and may be linearly analyzed; retrospectively, it is discoverable that inadvertently they are all interaffecting one another synergetically as a spherical, interprecessionally regenerative, tensegrity spherical integrity. Geodesic spheres demonstrate the compressionally discontinuous--tensionally continuous integrity. Ecology is tensegrity geodesic spherical programming. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises. (Ken Thompson)
To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge. View quote
Grace Hopper
Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others. View quote
Geert Hofstede
Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives. View quote
George Dantzig
If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming. View quote
George Dantzig