20th-century Programmer Quotes

Richard Stallman

Steve Wozniak

Aaron Swartz

Eric S. Raymond

Ward Cunningham

Larry Wall

John D. Carmack

"Easy" is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs.

David Heinemeier Hansson

PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?

Yes, I noted that there were hardly any or no women in certain high level positions. But as time passed, I, along with others, did attain, and with pride for managing to do so, a series of positions in the ladder.

Henriette Avram

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

You know what guys do? They stand up for people. You know why? Two reasons. It's right. And it feels good. Even if the person doesn't know what you did. Maybe especially then.

If they come to us, we do all of the work and take all of the risk. They have no financial exposure. Making the client themselves is always risky. However you cannot look at it in terms of money only. When a game is ported to a second platform, it almost always exposes bugs and problems that would otherwise have been missed, as the developers have to re-work portions of the game. This will mean that creating a Linux version will increase the stability of the Windows version, and increase the quality of their core product, a fact that in itself may justify the cost of a Linux port.

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

Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel.

People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment... But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity."

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.

Douglas Crockford

Now I'm a pretty lazy person and am prepared to work quite hard in order to avoid work.

If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the Wiki, then ignore them and go about your business.

Lee Daniel Crocker

One thing about school - I always had this attitude that I was in school to learn, and attempted to do whatever was involved in that process, while school had this attitude that I was there to earn grades, which I couldn't care less about. Unsurprisingly, my grades weren't very good.

Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Doing GPL work is doing charity work in our current legal and economic framework.

We are still in the infancy of naming what is really happening on software development projects.

Alistair Cockburn

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday

Charles Petzold

Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self.

If you are concerned about netiquette, you are either concerned about your own and follow good netiquette, or you are concerned about others and violate good netiquette by bothering people with your "concern", as the only netiquette you can actually affect is your own.

It's funny how when you're up so late at night for so long your mind can get into these creative places, the kind of creative places that come to you when you're halfway between asleep and awake.

For there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold, imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy.

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.