Quotes About Programmers

Or perhaps Siri's programmers included parents who anticipated their children's unauthorized use of their mobile devices—trust me, a four year old can use an iPhone better than most adults):

lack drama. Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don't have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode? Organizing

There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them.

Simple church leaders are designers. They design opportunities for spiritual growth. Complex church leaders are programmers. They run ministry programs.

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is also a 10 to 1 difference in productivity among software organizations

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

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI's list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.

A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. So if you are a high-tech person in that company, then you're basically a glorified typist in some sense. It's very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers do that makes them more than typists.

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is an expert of understatement in his leadership of Linux development community. When eager programmers would ask him, '"What part of Linux should I work on?' his answer would usually be, '"Let me know when you find out' (p.286).

Product development involves an incredible mix of disciplines, from designers to engineers and programmers, manufacturing, packaging, sales, marketing, and service.

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.

Python programmers are able to write large OOP frameworks and applications without private declarations — an interesting finding about access controls in general that is beyond the scope of our purposes here.

When people write software, they are not writing it for themselves. In fact, they are not even writing primarily for the computer. Rather, good programmers know that code is written for the next human being who has to read it in order to maintain or reuse it. If that person cannot understand the code, it's all but useless in a realistic development scenario.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

Errors in code are what programmers call bugs, though when our programs go wrong, we prefer to call them "unexpected additional features." Very