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Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion, more interesting than the inventions themselves. (Leibnitz)
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. (Dijkstra)
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense. (Dijkstra)
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. (Dijkstra)
You must not give the world what it asks for, but what it needs. (Dijkstra)
One man's constant is another man's variable. (Perlis)
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up. (Perlis)
Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them. (Perlis)
In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm. (Perlis)
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one. (Perlis)
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some. (Perlis)
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. (Knuth)
Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. (Knuth)
An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program. (Torvalds)
Talk is cheap. Show me the code. (Torvalds)
The NIH syndrome (Not Invented Here) is a disease. (Torvalds)
I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do. (Torvalds)
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. (Turing)
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. (Leibnitz)
The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future. (Leibnitz)
It does not seem possible for all possible things to exist, they get in one another's way. (Leibnitz)
I recognize the lion by his paw. (Jacob Bernoulli)
Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics. (Poisson)
There are many questions which fools can ask that wise men cannot answer. (Polya)
a mathematics teacher is a midwife to ideas. (Polya)
This principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible. (Polya)
In order to solve this differential equation you look at it till a solution occurs to you. (Polya)
In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them. (von Neumann)
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. (von Neumann)
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. (von Neumann)
Anyone who considers arithmetic methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. (von Neumann)
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous. (Kernighan)
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. (Ritchie)
Most of the bright people don't work for you - no matter who you are. (Joy)
Sometimes the easiest way to get something done is to be a little naive about it. (Joy)
a language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do. (Ritchie)
Projects promoting programming in natural language are intrinsically doomed to fail. (Dijkstra)
Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is. (Wall)
As we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. (Brooks)
Why would you want more than one machine language? (von Neumann)
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. (Brooks)
Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container. (Myhrvold)
More people have ascended bodily into heaven than have shipped great software on time. (McCarthy)
Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost. (Stroustrup)
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. (Whitehead)
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. (Galilei)
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. (Einstein)
There is nothing in the programming field more despicable than an undocumented program. (Yourdan)
Successful software always gets changed. (Brooks)
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. (Kernighan)
a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. (Erdös)
Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. (Boehm)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. (Kay)
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? (Einstein)
Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach. (Einstein)
I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. (Kay)
The unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books. (Leibniz)
Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits. (Perlis)
It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures. (Perlis)
Let's remember that there is only one nature—the division into science and engineering, and subdivision into physics, chemistry, civil and electrical, is a human imposition, not a natural one. (Wulf)
Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems. (Laplace)
What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense. (Laplace)
My favorite description of what engineers do is 'design under constraint.' (Wulf)