All Time Famous Programming Quotes

Programming refers to the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. It involves instructing a computer to perform specific tasks or functions by providing it with a set of instructions written in a programming language that the computer can understand and execute. Programming can be used to create software applications, websites, games, mobile apps, and much more. It’s essentially the art and science of giving instructions to computers to solve problems and accomplish various tasks.

Programming Quotes

1. “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”
— Linus Torvalds

2. “It’s harder to read code than to write it.”
— Joel Spolsky

3. “Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”
— Linus Torvalds

4. “Good software, like wine, takes time.”
— Joel Spolsky

5. “Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.”
— Bill Gates

6. “This is a software-powered world.”
— Satya Nadella

7. “One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.”
— Ken Thompson

8. “Nothing works better than just improving your product.”
— Joel Spolsky

9. “Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”
— Joel Spolsky

10. “Listen to your customers, not your competitors.”
— Joel Spolsky

11. “Software is eating the world.”
— Marc Andreessen

12. “Software is the magic thing whose importance only goes up over time.”
— Bill Gates

13. “Writing code is not production, it’s not always craftsmanship though it can be, it’s design.”
— Joel Spolsky

14. “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”
— Tom Cargill

15. “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”
— Alan Turing

16. “Indeed one of the best ways to deflect attacks is to make it look like they’re succeeding. It’s the software equivalent of playing dead.”
— Joel Spolsky

17. “Code never lies, comments sometimes do.”
— Ron Jeffries

18. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
— Martin Fowler

19. “If, at first, you do not succeed, call it version 1.0.”
— Khayri R.R. Woulfe

20. “Laziness is a programmers main virtue.”
— Larry Wall

21. “Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.”
— Richard Stallman

22. “Make it work, make it right, make it fast.”
— Kent Beck

23. “The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

24. “A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.”
— Doug Linder

25. “If you think it’s simple, then you have misunderstood the problem.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

26. “The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.”
— Dennis Ritchie

27. “Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.”
— Alan Turing

28. “I’m not a great programmer; I’m just a good programmer with great habits.”
— Kent Beck

29. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.”
— Rick Cook

30. “The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You’re going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.”
— Gabe Newell

31. “Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.”
— Donald Knuth

32. “Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares.”
— Robert C. Martin

33. “Confusion is part of programming.”
— Felienne Hermans

34. “When done well, software is invisible.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

35. “Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.”
— Nicholas Negroponte

36. “Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.”
— Cory House

37. “The most fundamental problem in software development is complexity. There is only one basic way of dealing with complexity: divide and conquer.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

38. “A program that has not been tested does not work.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

39. “There’s a saying in the software design industry: “Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.””
— Larry Wall

40. “Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray.”
— IEEE Computer Society

41. “Programming is learned by writing programs.”
— Brian Kernighan

42. “90% of the functionality delivered now is better than 100% delivered never.”
— Brian Kernighan

43. “If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”
— John Carmack

44. “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”
— Linus Torvalds

45. “Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.”
— Donald Knuth

46. “One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.”
— David Parnas

47. “Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.”
— Brian Kernighan

48. “Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only knew one language.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

49. “You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. Its logic-based creativity.”
— John Romero

50. “Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment.”
— Kent Beck

51. “Don’t document bad code – rewrite it.”
— Brian Kernighan

52. “C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.”
— Alan Perlis

53. “Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.”
— Guido van Rossum

54. “Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

55. “An API that isn’t comprehensible isn’t usable.”
— James Gosling

56. “Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.”
— Chris Pine

57. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.”
— Eric S. Raymond

58. “Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a “methodology” or on a schedule.”
— Damian Conway

59. “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

60. “I don’t like the feeling, but I’ve got to say that a little fear makes me a more focused, more responsible programmer.”
— Kent Beck

61. “Hello World!”
— QuoteFancy

62. “The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it’s pointless.”
— Bram Cohen

63. “Coding like poetry should be short and concise.”
— Santosh Kalwar

64. “Programmer: A machine that turns coffee into code.”
— Anonymous

65. “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
— Brian Kernighan

66. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”
— Seymour Cray

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

68. “Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.”
— John Carmack

69. “Good architecture makes the system easy to understand, easy to develop, easy to maintain, and easy to deploy. The ultimate goal is to minimize the lifetime cost of the system and to maximize programmer productivity.”
— Robert C. Martin

70. “To be a hacker – when I use the term – is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.”
— Tim Berners-Lee

71. “Believe the terrain, not the map.”
— Brian Kernighan

72. “Ask a programmer to review ten lines of code, he’ll find ten issues. Ask him to do five hundred lines, and he’ll say it looks good.”
— Gene Kim

73. “The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

74. “One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that the professional understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.”
— Robert C. Martin

75. “Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

76. “As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.”
— Douglas McIlroy

77. “I’ve known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.”
— Kent Beck

78. “Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.”
— Richard Stallman

79. “There is no place like 127.0.0.1.”
— QuoteFancy

80. “Tests are stories we tell the next generation of programmers on a project.”
— Roy Osherove

81. “There is always one more bug to fix.”
— Ellen Ullman

82. “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
— Sam Redwine

83. “A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.”
— Dennis Ritchie

84. “The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”
— Alan Kay

85. “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”
— Fred Brooks

86. “A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.”
— Alan Perlis

87. “The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.”
— Brian Kernighan

88. “Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

89. “The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

90. “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.”
— John Carmack

91. “LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.”
— Alan Perlis

92. “Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.”
— Bjarne Stroustrup

93. “It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!”
— Robert C. Martin

94. “We build our computers the way we build our cities – over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”
— Ellen Ullman

95. “Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.”
— Cal Newport

96. “Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication.”
— Boris Beizer

97. “Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one.”
— Brian Kernighan

98. “The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”
— Joseph Weizenbaum

99. “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”
— Randall E. Stross

100. “An effective way to test code is to exercise it at its natural boundaries.”
— Brian Kernighan