Funny Quotes About Programming

“I invented it, Bill made it famous.”
David Bradley (wrote the code for Ctrl-Alt-Delete on the IBM PC)

“As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.”
Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949.
“Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs”
James Gosling, co-inventor of Java
“Keyboard not found. Press < F1 > to RESUME. “
Source unknown (appears in many common BIOSes as a real error message)
“There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
unknown
“There are only 10 types of people in this world. Those who know ternary, those who don’t and those who confuse it with binary.”
unknown
“A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do”
Dennis M. Ritchie
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
F. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month.
“Always program as if the person who will be maintaining your program is a violent psychopath that knows where you live.”
Martin Golding
“Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.”
Bruce Brown

“Base eight is just like base ten really, if you’re missing two fingers.”
Tom Lehrer

“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.”
Ralph Johnson
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”
Donald Knuth
“bug, n: An elusive creature living in a program that makes it incorrect. The activity of “debugging”, or removing bugs from a program, ends when people get tired of doing it, not when the bugs are removed.”
“Datamation”, January 15, 1984
“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.”
Dennis M. Ritchie
“Coding styles are like assholes, everyone has one and no one likes anyone elses.”
Eric Warmenhoven
“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.”
Brian W. Kernighan
“Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.”
Dick Brandon
“Don’t get suckered in by the comments— they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code.”
Dave Storer
“He who hasn’t hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain.”
John Moore

“I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: ‘Dijkstra would not have liked this’, well that would be enough immortality for me.”
Edsger Dijkstra

“If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
Edsger Dijkstra
“If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.”
Norm Schryer
“Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.”
Dave Platt
“Memory is like an orgasm. It’s a lot better if you don’t have to fake it.”
Seymore Cray (on virtual memory)
“Once you’re done writing the code, never open it again unless you want to see how uncomprehensible and utterly ridiculous it really is.”
Raphael Sazonov
“Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.”
Isaac Asimov
“Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.”
Michael Sinz
“Software Engineering is that part of Computer Science which is too difficult for the Computer Scientist.”
F. L. Bauer
“The evolution of languages: FORTRAN is a non-typed language. C is a weakly typed language. Ada is a strongly typed language. C++ is a strongly hyped language.”
Ron Sercely

“The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.”
Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
Nathaniel Borenstein
“The ultimate metric that I would like to propose for user friendliness is quite simple: if this system was a person, how long would it take before you punched it in the nose?”
Tom Carey
“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense”
Edsger Dijkstra
“Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed.”
Bob Gray