It just so happens my friend sent me a long list of programming-related quotations today. Here are several of the somewhat humorous ones:
"I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does quite what I want
But only what I tell it."
-Anonymous
"Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why.
Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why."
-Anonymous
"Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement."
-Fred Brooks
"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
-Rich Cook
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
-Robert Firth
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
-C.A.R. Hoare
"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
-Hofstadter's Law
"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."
-Stan Kelly-Bootle
"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
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-Bruce Leverett
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
-Ted Nelson
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works."
-Alan J. Perlis
"When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop."
-Alan J. Perlis
There are
plenty more, but I'll stop now.