American Programmer Quotes

Richard Stallman

Steve Wozniak

Aaron Swartz

Eric S. Raymond

Ward Cunningham

Larry Wall

John D. Carmack

The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

All women love a good geek, and those who tell you otherwise are lying.

Evan Schoenberg

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.

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

The difference between a hacker and consumer is a consumer says, "I wish it would work this way." A hacker says, "I've got a screwdriver and a few minutes."

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

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.

A few months ago I was visiting my mother, and she said that as a child I had always wanted to learn everything, and that it took me a long time to realize that you couldn't learn everything. I got really angry, and I shouted "I'm not done yet!"

Mark Jason Dominus

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong.

Greg Kroah-Hartman

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

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.

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

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Eric S. Raymond

We needed an operating system at Seattle Computer for our own computers and I wanted to do one. So we decided to go for it. I was waiting for Digital [Research] to come out with CP/M-86. I thought they would have it real soon. If they had beat me I wouldn't have taken the trouble. I had always wanted to write my own operating system. I've always hated CP/M and thought I could do it a lot better.

I like the observation that Forth is an amplifier: a good programmer can write a great program; a bad programmer a terrible one. I feel no need to cater to bad programmers.

Charles H. Moore

I felt aimless, but it felt fine. (This is not what I wanted to feel though. I wanted to feel a great absence, a longing, a distance that would finally inspire.)

Jonathan Gillette

If I'm the only one pushing Linux gaming, we have a serious problem. I'm happy for the contributions I've made, but I would be happier to know that Linux gaming can continue if I get hit by a bus. There are others out there doing what I do. You should interview them too.

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

Richard Stallman

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

When I ask candidates to tell me about their weaknesses, I am hoping for a wise, honest, and self-confident answer. When I hear a candidate rationally admit a weakness, I am impressed. When I hear a candidate duck the question with language straight out of a book, I start thinking about the next candidate.

Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are my 'gold standard', and it has been quite a while since I have had to report a problem to them, and even their brand new extensions work as documented the first time I try them. When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault.

John D. Carmack

What is "this drive"? It's the tendency to not simply accept things as they are but to want to think about them, to understand them. To not be content to simply feel sad but to ask what sadness means. To not just get a bus pass but to think about the economic reasons getting a bus pass makes sense. I call this tendency the intellectual.

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

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