Favorite Quotes

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
- Leonardo da Vinci (attributed)

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
- Hal Abelson & Gerald Sussman

"[Lisp is] the greatest single programming language ever designed."
- Alan Kay

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
- Tony Hoare (popularized by Donald Knuth)

"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."
- Jon Bentley & Doug McIlroy

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction."
- Albert Einstein

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Computers

"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it."
- Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."
- Edsger Dijkstra

"A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do."
- Dennis Ritchie

"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
- Brian Kernighan

"When in doubt, use brute force."
- Ken Thompson

"You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything."
- Donald Knuth

"Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing."
- Rob Pike

"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California."
- Edsger Dijkstra (attributed)

"The object-oriented model makes it easy to build up programs by accretion. What this often means, in practice, is that it provides a structured way to write spaghetti code."
- Paul Graham

"Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence."
- Edsger Dijkstra

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
- Bill Gates

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Life

"If I had a dime for every million-dollar idea I have had, I would be rich."
- Tamina Sculcheon

"If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice."
- Norman R. Augustine

"All you have to decide is what you're going to do with the time you are given."
- Gandalf

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
- Tara Ploughman

"The best writing is rewriting."
- E. B. White

"Anybody who cares less about wanting to be cool, I think, is more interesting."
- Aimee Mann

"However little television you watch, watch less."
- David McCullough