Quotes About Programming

Growing up, I spent my time doing useless stuff looking at computers.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

The second stream of material that is going to come out of this project is a programming environment and a set of programming tools where we really want to focus again on the needs of the newbie. This environment is going to have to be extremely user-friendly.

To devise an information processing system capable of getting along on its own - it must handle its own problems of programming, bookkeeping, communication and coordination with its users. It must appear to its users as a single, integrated personality.

It gives you great pleasure to know that millions of developers, day to day, make their living using the software that you created.

We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice, but they're very close to the machine and what we wanted was to empower regular users to build applications for Linux.

'The Librarians' fills a vacuum, providing true family programming for TNT.

I understand what scripting and programming is, but do I know how to do it? Not really. But, I think that even knocking on the door allows you to understand a little bit of that kind of stuff. Mainly what 'Silicon Valley' has taught me, in that respect, is the business side of it, with that gold rush element as opposed to creating software.

In the '80s, society created a caricature of what a hacker or a programmer looked like: a guy wearing a hoodie, drinking energy drinks, sitting in a basement somewhere coding. Today, programmers look like the men we see in the show 'Silicon Valley' on HBO. If you look at the message girls are getting, it's saying, 'This is not for you.'

I don't program, so I don't belong in Silicon Valley. If I did belong in Silicon Valley, I'd be there creating a revolutionary compression algorithm for billions of dollars.

LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

I don't like test names. Technically they're method names, but they're never called explicitly.

Within a single test, DRY can often apply.

The problem of reference was already an almost insoluble one: how is it with the real? How is it with representation? But when, with the Virtual, the referent disappears, when it disappears into the technical programming of the image, when there is no longer the situation of the real world set over against a light-sensitive film (it is the same with language, which is like the sensitive film of ideas), then there is, ultimately, no possible representation any more.

At present, computers are spectacular at number crunching and data processing. We can code programmes that feel as though computers are interacting with us, and that's fun, but in fact they aren't interacting in a way that we expect a human being to interact. But what will happen when a programme that has self-developed, that has its own version of what we call consciousness - realises, in the human sense of the verb 'to realise', exactly what/who is on the other side of the screen?

I've been saying all along that my biggest fear is that someone would program a machine to give a wrong answer. If that were to happen, the machine would still work fine - we just wouldn't know it.

Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am it's because they were up all night.

If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work.

If C++ has taught me one thing, it's this: Just because the system is consistent doesn't mean it's not the work of Satan.

The ultimate laziness is not using Perl. That saves you so much work you wouldn't believe it if you had never tried it.

I think there are a lot of hurdles between a normal consumer brand figuring out their mobile strategy - let alone their chat app strategy - and programming a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go.

24 hour broadcasts have to stretch limited material to fit 24 hours worth of space.

If children can't handle competition when it's necessary, or take some criticism, or never strive to be better because their parents inadvertently programmed them to believe they are already the best even when they're not, then they are in for some serious shocks and bumps down the road.