category: tech
description: Programming wisdom and software engineering quotes
entries:
- text: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
author: Donald Knuth
- text: "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."
author: Edsger W. Dijkstra
- text: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
author: Harold Abelson
- text: "The best way to predict the future is to implement it."
author: David Heinemeier Hansson
- text: "Make it work, make it right, make it fast."
author: Kent Beck
- text: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
author: Martin Fowler
- text: "First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."
author: John Johnson
- text: "Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it's bad."
author: Cory House
- text: "The most dangerous phrase in the language is: We've always done it this way."
author: Grace Hopper
- text: "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- text: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
author: Bill Gates
- text: "Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."
author: Edward V. Berard
- text: "The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before."
author: Bill Gates
- text: "Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering."
author: Bill Gates
- text: "The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple."
author: Grady Booch
- text: "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
author: Phil Karlton
- text: "It's not a bug -- it's an undocumented feature."
author: Anonymous
- text: "The best error message is the one that never shows up."
author: Thomas Fuchs
- text: "A program that produces incorrect results twice as fast is infinitely slower."
author: John Ousterhout
- text: "Deleted code is debugged code."
author: Jeff Sickel
- text: "The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren't there."
author: Gordon Bell
- text: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place."
author: Brian Kernighan
- text: "UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity."
author: Dennis Ritchie
- text: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
author: Linus Torvalds
- text: "Good code is its own best documentation."
author: Steve McConnell
- text: "Programming is not about typing, it's about thinking."
author: Rich Hickey
- text: "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning."
author: Anonymous
- text: "Complexity is the enemy of execution."
author: Tony Hsieh
- text: "The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity."
author: Edsger W. Dijkstra
- text: "The only way to go fast is to go well."
author: Robert C. Martin
- text: "Software and cathedrals are much the same -- first we build them, then we pray."
author: Sam Redwine
- text: "If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
author: Edsger W. Dijkstra
- text: "Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code."
author: Dan Salomon
- text: "No code runs faster than no code."
author: Kevlin Henney
- text: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing."
author: Alan Perlis
- text: "The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit."
author: Anonymous
- text: "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
author: Ken Thompson
- text: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is."
author: Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
- text: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
author: Arthur C. Clarke
- text: "Shipping is a feature. A really important feature."
author: Joel Spolsky
- text: "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it."
author: Pamela Zave
- text: "Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file."
author: Louis Srygley
- text: "Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable."
author: Ralph Johnson
- text: "When in doubt, use brute force."
author: Ken Thompson
- text: "Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind."
author: Donald Knuth
- text: "The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user."
author: C.A.R. Hoare
- text: "Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it."
author: Patrick McKenzie
- text: "Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime."
author: David Leinweber
- text: "It works on my machine."
author: Every Developer
- text: "Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."
author: Kent Beck
- text: "The value of a prototype is in the education it gives you, not in the code itself."
author: Alan Cooper
- text: "Write shy code -- modules that don't reveal anything unnecessary and don't rely on anything unnecessary."
author: Andy Hunt
- text: "Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction."
author: Sandi Metz
- text: "If you think good architecture is expensive, try bad architecture."
author: Brian Foote
- text: "The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language."
author: Alan Kay