If you haven't had enough, yet, of those ubiquitous collections of memorable phrases, epigrams, aphorisms, and adages, here is mine.
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about
programming, is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis
Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to
add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should,
therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Purely applicative languages are poorly applicable.
Alan Perlis
When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
Steve Hoflich
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to
students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential
programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of
regeneration.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of
nothing.
Alan Perlis
Think of C++ as an object-oriented assembly language.
Bruce Hoult
Visual Basic is not an object oriented language, it is an object
based language. It is a poor imitation of an object system for
a poor imitation of a programming language that poor imitations
of programmers use to write poor imitations of programs for poor
imitations of employers who pay poor imitations of programmers
salaries. I think I beat that one to death.
Jim H. Jacobs
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Nicholas Murray Butler
The purpose of a graphical user interface is to make simple
things simpler and complex things impossible.
...
I have stopped reading Stephen King novels. Now I just read C
code instead.
Richard A. O'Keefe
Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description
for time.
Alan Perlis
Life, loath it or hate it, you can't like it.
Marvin
Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using
rocks to sharpen sticks.
Thant Tessman
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp".
Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken
for good.
Paul Graham
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
a door
Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it,
poorly.
Henry Spencer
What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to
eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to
benefit those who profit from scarcity.
John Gilmore
The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty
formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't
master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be
considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable
diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in
this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
Was ist ist,
Was nicht ist ist möglich
Blixa Bargeld
People without qualities tend to regard money as a quality and
do anything to improve more and more on that.
...
Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds - and
fanatics.
Cassius J. Keyser
Chi fuma uccide anche te: digli di bucarsi.
a graffiti
(roughly: Who smokes kills you too: tell him to shoot up.)
42
Big Thought
Don't let school interfere with your education.
Mark Twain
It needs some clues to get to a conclusion.
Intelligent
people need fewer clues to get to a conclusion.
It doesn't
need any clue at all for an imbecile to jump to a
conclusion.
...
History is written by those who can't read it. Thus it's
destined to repeat itself over and over again.
...
Rock singers are those who think things may seem more
interesting if yelled to a microphone.
...
Learning of many things does not teach intelligence.
Heraclitus
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how
to turn numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was
a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it
was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's
a brochure.
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