Programming Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old programming quotes, programming sayings, and programming proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing. Gerald Weinberg
Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming. John Carmack
First, solve the problem. Then, write the code. John Johnson
Marketing is the obverse of programming. John McAfee
You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity. John Romero
Sometimes it's better to leave something alone, to pause, and that's very true of programming. Joyce Wheeler
Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming: feedback is the treatment. Kent Beck
Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program. Linus Torvalds
Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file. Louis Srygley
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. Martin Fowler
Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. Michael Sinz
Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples. Niklaus Wirth
Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated. Niklaus Wirth
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Oscar Wilde
Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable. Ralph Johnson
Programming is a pretty tricky thing to start learning. You need to combine it with comedy to get a wider audience. Simone Giertz