Top 160 Programming Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Hello World!”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

52. “Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.”

— Chris Pine

53. “Don’t document bad code – rewrite it.”

— Brian Kernighan

54. “Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only knew one language.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

55. “Programmer: A machine that turns coffee into code.”

— Anonymous

56. “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”

— Linus Torvalds

57. “When I wrote this code, only God and I understood what I did. Now only God knows.”

— Anonymous

58. “Let’s write some code.”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

59. “It’s not a bug; it’s an undocumented feature.”

— Anonymous

60. “C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.”

— Alan Perlis

61. “The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it’s pointless.”

— Bram Cohen

62. “There is always one more bug to fix.”

— Ellen Ullman

63. “Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.”

— Cory House

64. “Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better.”

— Donald Knuth

65. “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

66. “As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.”

— Douglas McIlroy

67. “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

68. “The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.”

— Seymour Cray

69. “An API that isn’t comprehensible isn’t usable.”

— James Gosling

70. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.”

— Eric S. Raymond

71. “Believe the terrain, not the map.”

— Brian Kernighan

72. “The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

73. “Tests are stories we tell the next generation of programmers on a project.”

— Roy Osherove

74. “Quality is a product of a conflict between programmers and testers.”

— Yegor Bugayenko

75. “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.”

— Guido van Rossum

76. “Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

77. “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

— Bill Gates

78. “Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.”

— John Carmack

79. “Good architecture makes the system easy to understand, easy to develop, easy to maintain, and easy to deploy. The ultimate goal is to minimize the lifetime cost of the system and to maximize programmer productivity.”

— Robert C. Martin

80. “Ask a programmer to review ten lines of code, he’ll find ten issues. Ask him to do five hundred lines, and he’ll say it looks good.”

— Gene Kim

81. “One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that the professional understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.”

— Robert C. Martin

82. “I’ve known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.”

— Kent Beck

83. “It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!”

— Robert C. Martin

84. “I don’t like the feeling, but I’ve got to say that a little fear makes me a more focused, more responsible programmer.”

— Kent Beck

85. “All great programmers learn the same way. They poke the box. They code something and see what the computer does. They change it and see what the computer does. They repeat the process again and again until they figure out how the box works.”

— Seth Godin

86. “I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed.”

— Martin Fowler

87. “I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”

— Douglas Adams

88. “The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.”

— Alan Kay

89. “The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.”

— Brian Kernighan

90. “To be a hacker – when I use the term – is somebody who is creative and does wonderful things.”

— Tim Berners-Lee

91. “Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.”

— John Carmack

92. “Anybody who comes to you and says he has a perfect language is either naive or a salesman.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

93. “Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.”

— Cal Newport

94. “An organization that treats its programmers as morons will soon have programmers that are willing and able to act like morons only.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

95. “Trying to outsmart a compiler defeats much of the purpose of using one.”

— Brian Kernighan

96. “We build our computers the way we build our cities – over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.”

— Ellen Ullman

97. “The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.”

— Joseph Weizenbaum

98. “The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.”

— Randall E. Stross

99. “Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.”

— Richard Stallman

100. “What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

— Fred Brooks