Programmer Quotes

Richard Stallman

Steve Wozniak

Aaron Swartz

Eric S. Raymond

Ward Cunningham

Larry Wall

John D. Carmack

The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

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

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

Eric S. Raymond

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

Healthcare is one of the areas where open data will potentially take off soonest and have the biggest impact.

Good luck distinguishing which sign is the REAL sign when my entire front lawn is covered with thousands of little green signs - each with a different number! Ahahahah! I'll be EVERY address in the whole freakin' township! And what are you gonna do about it? Hopefully, NOTHING!

Iterative development for Android is about 10x slower than iterative development for Ubuntu, simply because I can't just run it on the desktop I'm developing it on.

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

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

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

Alistair Cockburn

Gambas does not try to be compatible with Visual Basic, and will never be. I'm convinced that its syntax and internals are far better than the one's of its proprietary cousin.

Benoît Minisini

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?

I personally object to episodic games where you play one screen of Space Invaders and one screen of Breakout and one screen of Galaxians and one screen of this and one of that. To me, that's not a game. It's just taking five bad games, putting them together, and calling them one good game. I'm philosophically against that.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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."

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

When people work code they can often see things I set out to do that they wouldn't notice otherwise. And there are no obligations to say, "Ward you're brilliant," but sometimes they say, "Ward you're brilliant." And that strokes my ego. Pride of ownership? You bet.

Ward Cunningham

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

Putting it simply, STL is the result of a bacterial infection.

Alexander Stepanov

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

David Heinemeier Hansson

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