Great Programming Quotes

I found a great post on stackoverflow.com, the new joint venture between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Most of the stuff there hasn't been very interesting to me (I don't work with .Net or Java, and a lot of the other questions seem fairly basic). Recently someone asked people to list their favorite programming quotes. The results are great; here are some of my favorites:

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Brian Kernighan: 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.

Tom Cargill The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

Isaac Asimov The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

Alan Kay I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

P. J. Plauger My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.

Edsger Dijkstra If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Edsger Dijkstra Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Donald Knuth We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Rich Cook Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Jamie Zawinski Linux is only free if your time has no value.

Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month Plan to throw one away; you will anyway.

R. Buckminster Fuller When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

John Carmack Fight code entropy.

Douglas Adams I (...) am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.