Top 16 Of The Most Inspiring And Witty Programming Quotes

Recently, we were looking for a few programming quotes for one of our presentations, and we were pretty amazed to see some of the very funny and witty ones that really needed some brains to figure out the “fun” part.

Below, we have provided a few for your reference; particularly the ones we liked. Have a look.

ONE

“We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." - Ellen Ullman

TWO

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

THREE

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.” - Richard Feynman

Source- Wiki

FOUR

“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” - Ralph Johnson

FIVE

“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.” - Edward V Berard

SIX

"One of the best programming skills you can have is knowing when to walk away for awhile." - Oscar Godson

SEVEN

“Java is to JavaScript what Car is to Carpet.” - Chris Heilmann

EIGHT

“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

NINE

“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.” - Alan Kay

TEN

“Copy and paste is a design error.” - David Parnas

ELEVEN

“You've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting.” - Steve Jobs

TWELVE

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?” - Brian W. Kernighan

THIRTEEN

“On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” - Charles Babbage

FOURTEEN

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. ” - Donald Knuth

FIFTEEN

“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.” - Alan Kay

Source- Flickr

SIXTEEN

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.” - Alan Perlis