Top 120 Programming Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Quality is a product of a conflict between programmers and testers.”

— Yegor Bugayenko

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Dennis Ritchie

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

— Martin Fowler

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

— John Carmack

107. “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

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

110. “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

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

— Alan Perlis

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

— Ellen Ullman

113. “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

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

— Marissa Meyer

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

— Bjarne Stroustrup

116. “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

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

— Brian Kernighan

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Andrew Hunt

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

— Dan Brown

122. “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

123. “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

124. “Automated testing is a safety net that protects the program from its programmers.”

— Yegor Bugayenko

125. “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

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

— Jeff Goldblum

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

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

— John Carmack

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Paul Graham

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

— Anonymous

137. “CAFFEINE LOADING...”

— QuoteFancy Wallpaper

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