Top 178 Programmer Quotes & Sayings

The last thing I would ever do is try to become a network programmer.

I am a composer, horn player, and computer programmer.

It's better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.

The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.

The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-It notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

Common programmer thought pattern: there are only three numbers: 0, 1, and n.

When we look at these historical women and what they've gone through, it's shocking to recognize some of our own experiences in theirs. When you look at someone like Ada Lovelace who is the first computer programmer, during her lifetime doctors said that was really sick because she was trying to use a masculine kind of brain that she didn't have. Today, her legacy of being the first programmer is stil disputed.

As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.

Before 'Dilbert,' I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.

The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late.

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

My background is as a computer scientist and programmer.

I'm still a really shitty programmer, but I know enough to hack a prototype together.

Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.

Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to.

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

I'm not a computer person at all. I only know how to turn them on. I'm not a programmer. I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag.

Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested.

I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.

You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that.

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a CEO. I'm a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.

It's funny: I was a photographer before I was a programmer.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

Man is programmed to find the programmer.

You don't have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.

The cowboy movies is not our go-to programmer anymore, here's a horror film.

Before coming to Congress, I worked as a computer programmer and a systems analyst.

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

The world is changing, and I believe that, if I want to stay employed as a programmer, I'm going to have to change with it.

The number of lines of code a programmer can write in a fixed period of time is the same independent of the language used.

Everyone needs to move - if you're a pro athlete, a contortionist, a computer programmer, or just somebody who wants to play with their kids.

I am a granddaughter of immigrants, put myself through college as a waitress, and I started my career as a computer programmer.

When we take the position that it is not only the programmer's responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner, then the above remarks have a profound influence on the programmer's activity: the object he has to produce must be usefully structured.

I think that's the responsibility of the CEO and the CEOs below me: to make sure that we're constantly putting people in places where they have the opportunity to develop into those careers but also having a rewards and recognition system that allows a great programmer to stay as a great programmer.

Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.

I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age 15.

From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.

I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.

I am a programmer.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.

I'm not a programmer; I'm more of a performer. I'm really bad at math.

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication.

I was a programmer.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity.