Top 160 Programming Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Automated testing is a safety net that protects the program from its programmers.”

— Yegor Bugayenko

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

— Steve Jobs

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

— Sam Redwine

104. “I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

— Linus Torvalds

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

— Dennis Ritchie

106. “Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.”

— John Carmack

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

— Alan Perlis

108. “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”

— Fred Brooks

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

— Boris Beizer

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

111. “We programmers are weird creatures. We love writing code. But when it comes to reading it we usually shy away. After all, writing code is so much more fun, and reading code is hard – sometimes almost impossible.”

— Kevlin Henney

112. “It’s better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.”

— Steve McConnell

113. “CAFFEINE LOADING...”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

114. “Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it.”

— Ellen Ullman

115. “C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.”

— Dennis Ritchie

116. “It is not enough for code to work. Code that works is often badly broken. Programmers who satisfy themselves with merely working code are behaving unprofessionally. They may fear that they don’t have time to improve the structure and design of their code, but I disagree. Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code.”

— Robert C. Martin

117. “God help us, we’re in the hands of engineers.”

— Jeff Goldblum

118. “Our civilization depends critically on software, and we have a dangerously low degree of professionalism in the computer fields.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

119. “The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

120. “The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

121. “LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.”

— Alan Perlis

122. “An effective way to test code is to exercise it at its natural boundaries.”

— Brian Kernighan

123. “Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again.”

— Joel Spolsky

124. “Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.”

— Marissa Meyer

125. “One of the big lessons of a big project is you don’t want people that aren’t really programmers programming, you’ll suffer for it!”

— John Carmack

126. “Pragmatic Programmers won’t sit idly by and watch their projects fall apart through neglect.”

— Andrew Hunt

127. “When a computer creates art, who is the artist – the computer or the programmer?”

— Dan Brown

128. “Good programming is not born from mere technical competence. I’ve seen highly intellectual programmers who can produce intense and impressive algorithms, who know their language standard by heart, but who write the most awful code.”

— Kevlin Henney

129. “Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.”

— Linus Torvalds

130. “Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer’s standard of quality and perfection. It has a detrimental effect on people as well as products.”

— Niklaus Wirth

131. “Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn’t as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.”

— John Carmack

132. “Most programming languages contain good parts and bad parts. I discovered that I could be better programmer by using only the good parts and avoiding the bad parts.”

— Douglas Crockford

133. “Our job as the game creators or developers – the programmers, artists, and whatnot – is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user’s shoes. We try to see what they’re seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.”

— Shigeru Miyamoto

134. “Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches.”

— Mark Forsyth

135. “Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.”

— John Carmack

136. “A non-programmer friend once remarked that code looks like poetry. I get that feeling from really good code, that everything in the text has a purpose and that it’s there to help me understand the idea. Unfortunately, writing code doesn’t have the same romantic image as writing poetry.”

— Kevlin Henney

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

— Paul Graham

138. “Set your sights higher. Don’t think of yourself as a programmer at a specific company – after all, it’s not likely that you’ll be at the same place forever – but as a participating member of an industry. You are a craftsperson or an artist. You have something to share beyond the expense-reporting application you’re developing for your human resources department or the bugs you’ve got stacked up in your company’s issue-tracking system.”

— Chad Fowler

139. “Computers are fast; developers keep them slow.”

— Anonymous

140. “Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

141. “The first law of computer science: Every problem is solved by yet another indirection.”

— Bjarne Stroustrup

142. “The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.”

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

143. “Good code is its own best documentation.”

— Steve McConnell

144. “If it’s not tested, it’s broken.”

— Bruce Eckel

145. “K.I.S.S.”

— Keep It Simple, Stupid

146. “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”

— Steve Jobs

147. “Nobody actually creates perfect code the first time around, except me. But there’s only one of me.”

— Linus Torvalds

148. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

— Donald Knuth

149. “Coding is today’s language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead of consumers of computer science.”

— Maria Klawe

150. “UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.”

— Dennis Ritchie