Quotes About Programming

Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.

Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.

First get to work; you can enjoy yourself afterwards! Such is the recurring, rhyming themesong that is passed down into the head, programming militarily the rhythm of the body's movements. Such is, in its numbing insistance, the tune that orchestrates the retreat of nascent intelligence. And rest assured – it will be a different intelligence that ends up in charge over the frozen behavior of working hours, an intelligence in which heart counts the least and is petrified the most.

Goto, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers.

Meme theory is an example of the kind of prestidigitation needed to present an image of us as biologically programmed in the face of the overwhelming evidence that everyday human life is utterly different from the reflex-, tropism-, instinct-driven life of animals (although of course we rely on reflexes to perform our voluntary actions, may be in part guided by tropisms and have a general direction influenced remotely by instincts).

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

I absolutely know how to sit in front of a computer screen, that's for sure.

Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually.

I was surprised about vi going in, though, I didn't know it was in System V.

Dan Quayle, mutating the memes in the United Negro College Fund's motto, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." There is some good news in this book. So before I get into how mind viruses are spreading wildly throughout the world—infecting people with unwanted programming like the Michelangelo computer virus infects computers with self-destruct instructions—I'll start with the good news. . . .

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.

There are three things a man must do before his life is done; Write two lines in APL, And make the buggers run.

Give a man a program, frustrate him for a day. Teach a man to program, frustrate him for a lifetime.

Machines can only find what ignorant men have programmed them to find.

What a lot of people don't know, because in a lot of TV and movies, they have a lot of men talking about computers - it was a woman who invented the first compiler!

There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

It all comes down to this: if your subconscious "financial blueprint" is not "set" for success, nothing you learn, nothing you know, and nothing you do will make much of a difference.

Radio stinks. The stations are making a lot of money, but they just aren't taking chances.

You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition.

I love doing the music. I love programming beats and kind of working on the music as much, if not more, than the actual rapping.