Top 120 Programming Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Don’t document bad code – rewrite it.”

— Brian Kernighan

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

54. “There is no place like 127.0.0.1.”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

55. “Coding like poetry should be short and concise.”

— Santosh Kalwar

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

— Alan Perlis

57. “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

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

— James Gosling

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

— Chris Pine

60. “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

61. “Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a “methodology” or on a schedule.”

— Damian Conway

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

— John Carmack

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

— Douglas McIlroy

64. “Hello World!”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

65. “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

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

— Bram Cohen

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

— Anonymous

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

— Ellen Ullman

69. “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

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

— Seymour Cray

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

— Bill Gates

72. “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

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

— Tim Berners-Lee

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

— Brian Kernighan

75. “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

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

77. “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

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

79. “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

80. “If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”

— Sam Redwine

81. “A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.”

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Alan Kay

83. “A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.”

— Alan Perlis

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

— Brian Kernighan

85. “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

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

— Robert C. Martin

87. “Certainly not every good program is object-oriented, and not every object-oriented program is good.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

88. “Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication.”

— Boris Beizer

89. “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

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

— Brian Kernighan

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Roy Osherove

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

— Fred Brooks

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

— Cory House

97. “Let’s write some code.”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

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

— Anonymous

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

— Anonymous

100. “Everybody should learn to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”

— Steve Jobs