For Programmers

Quotations about Computers, Programming, Programmers, and Engineering.

1. Don't worry about people stealing your idea.
   If it's original, you'll have to ram it down their throats.

   Howard H. Aiken 61.

2. No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.

   Mark Gibbs 62.

3. Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

   Mitch Kapor 63.

4. A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.
   It should be a pencil, not a pen.

   Paul Graham 64.

5. When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.

   Richard E. Pattis 65.

6. Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

   Steve Wozniak 66.

7. My programming language was solder.
   [On his early computers.]

   Terry Pratchett 67.

8. ---

9. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
   [On the removal of a 2-inch-long moth from the Harvard Mark I experimental computer, at Harvard, in August 1945.]

   Grace Hopper 68.