Programming Quotes

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
— Bill Gates

The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code.
— Paul Graham

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
— Alan Kay

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.
— Ray Ozzie

Good code is short, simple, and symmetrical - the challenge is figuring out how to get there.
— Sean Parent

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!
— John Carmack

An organisation that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.
— Bjarne Stroustrup

In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.
— Paul Graham

The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.
— Dr. Pamela Zave

Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.
— Larry Bossidy

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.
— Chris Sacca

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
— Leonardo da Vinci

Debugging time increases as a square of the program's size.
— Chris Wenham

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
— R. Buckminster Fuller

The best things are simple, but finding these simple things is not simple.
- Anonymous

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
— P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983

What I cannot build, I do not understand.
— Richard Feynman