Top 187 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Programmers

It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.

Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures.

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.

Nobody is an overnight success. Most overnight successes you see have been working at it for ten years.

No one cares what operating system you run as long as it stays up.

I don't have any great ambition to go out and make money. But I am still fascinated in starting up businesses and starting it in a way and running in a way that I want to do it.

Shared libraries are the work of the devil, the one true sign that the apocalypse is at hand.

I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later. Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort.

Dance releases endorphin chemicals into your brain and makes you feel alive and wanting to get on with the rest of your day. That positivity can help you to communicate better with other people because it gives you a much better mind set. Socially it brings you together with people.

Religion is designed for stupid people. Science is designed for stupid people who are embarrassed by their stupidity, who want to do something about it.

We're also confident that gamers are going to love our vision of the future.

It's not the ideas; it's design, implementation and hard work that make the difference.

I'll be damned if we don't find the time to get Linux builds done.

I want studios that make story-based games to start taking their stories more seriously. And that doesn't mean hiring a big shot writer from Hollywood; it means that story becomes integral to making your game. I don't see how you can achieve that without having an in-house writer that sits next to the designer, helping them make their levels, talking with the engineers about where we can tell the story more dynamically, pushing at technology.

One purpose of CRC cards [a design tool] is to fail early, to fail often, and to fail inexpensively. It is a lot cheaper to tear up a bunch of cards that it would be to reorganize a large amount of source code.

Learn not to add too many features right away, and get the core idea built and tested.

For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave.

Anyone with a little computer experience knows that anything can be copied bit-by-bit with the right equipment.

The last 10% of game design is really what separates the good games from the great games. It's what I call the clean-up phase of game design. Here's where you make sure all the elements look great. The game should look good, feel good, sound good, play good.

My basic rule is, if it could possibly come from the end user, it's not a run-time crash. But if it is my code to my code, I crash it as hard as possible—fail as early as possible.

I think a lot of the basis of the open source movement comes from procrastinating students.

If you can't figure out how to make money on three billion in revenue, when exactly will the profit magic be found? Ten billion? Fifty billion?

Myspace was always a bit edgy. People identified it with edginess and music.

A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.

Software is usually expected to be modified over the course of its productive life. The process of converting one correct program into a different correct program is extremely challenging.

What I do for a living is somewhat like mercenary prostitution. I spend a lot of energy trying to find games to bring to alternate platforms, like Linux and MacOS, and in my free time, I work on various open source projects, and other freebies like that. So I guess I'm a hooker with a heart of gold, sorta.

Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won't be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.

Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.

The currency in the developer community is enthusiasm.

All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn't anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc.

What is simplicity? Simplicity is the shortest path to a solution.

The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. ... Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual increasing training costs.

Using int made sense in the 50s. Not any more

We do a lot of talking with our mouths, but we don't necessarily realize the signals we give out physically with our body posture when we're talking to people.

Very clever implementation techniques are required to implement this insanity correctly and usefully, not to mention that code written with this feature used and abused east and west is exceptionally exciting to debug.

You're better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.

Planning is not just guessing, it is harmful guessing, because it is a waste of time. All the time you spend doing your five year plan you can use to worry about tomorrow.

C++ is a language strongly optimized for liars and people who go by guesswork and ignorance.

It's the best gift in the world to be able to get up and dance because it's the best gym. You artistically stretch your brain and you physically stretch your body to a higher point than a singular rotation movement like running. It makes your whole body move in lots of different ways, and it can make you very flexible as well, which is good for later life.

So, what does it mean for teaching and learning programming when the solution to every beginner problem is available on the Internet?

What we're doing with the digital permissions that we have for Xbox One is no different to that. If I am playing on that disc, which is installed to the hard drive on my Xbox One, everybody in my household who has permission to use my Xbox One can use that piece of content. So I can give that piece of content to my son and he can play it on the same system.

Windows isn't supposed to make sense, it's supposed to make money.

When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right.

The simple fact is that code quality tends to improve as you move between platforms... non-obvious bugs on Windows become VERY obvious in the Linux port and vice versa, and thus get fixed. So even the Windows gamers will win in all of this.

Life is too long to be good at C++ – if you had spent all that time to become good at it, you would essentially have to work with it, too, to get back the costs, and that would just be some long, drawn-out torture.

I don't claim to be a methodologist, but I act like one only because I do methodology to protect myself from crazy methodologists.

Just because something is a standard doesn’t mean it is the right choice for every application. Like XML, for example.

Ignoring for a moment the power of the American Medical Association, we still wouldn't see a huge amount of books on neurosurgery for dummies in 21 days or whatever. It's just plain inappropriate, and it's intentionally out of people's reach.

Don't ever get wrapped up with what other people think you should look like.

Did you know you can't steer a boat that isn't moving? Just like a life.

A system needs to be alive and workable even when other people than the first enthusiasts start using it. Reinvention and revolution are enthusiast stuff. Invention and evolution are engineering.

I now fully expect to spend the rest of my career pushing VR as far ahead as I can.

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

Releasing Linux versions has always been a matter of higher code quality, good software architecture, and technical interest for the platform.

I may be biased, but I tend to find a much lower tendency among female programmers to be dishonest about their skills, and thus do not say they know C++ when they are smart enough to realize that that would be a lie for all but perhaps 5 people on this planet.

JS will be a real functional language.

Nobody really knows what the Bourne shell's grammar is. Even examination of the source code is little help.

The world is beating a path to our door

In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.