quotes

Cultivate the passion of a 5-year old! (PragDave)

To do something well you have to love it. So to the extent you can preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it well. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. If you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is. (Paul Graham)

Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom. (Paul Graham)

Writing software should be treated as a creative activity (Dick Gabriel)

... my view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists. (Dick Gabriel)

Writing software is an art, and it takes about ten years to really get good at it. But there's an underlying attitude that programming and software development are easy. We have this attitude that programming is auxiliary, when it's a very central, difficult, human, sociological activity. (Dick Gabriel)

Computing is based on utility, performance, efficiency, and cleverness. Where are beauty, compassion, humanity, morality, the human spirit and creativity? (Dick Gabriel)

Habitability is one of the most important characteristics of software. It enables developers to live comfortably in and repair or modify code and design. (Dick Gabriel)

So a programmer working as programmers are meant to is always making new things. (Paul Graham)

Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach. - Albert Einstein

In programming, a lot of simplicity comes from knowing what matters and what doesn't matter.
-Ward Cunningham

Programming should be both fun and a joy. If something is fun, it is natural to learn more about it and to excel in it. It's hard to excel in something rote or boring. When programming is fun there is no feeling of overcoming resistance. The code and ideas just magically and effortlessly appear. When programming is not fun, every line of code is coming up against an immense emotional resistance, and the process becomes slow torture.
- Leo Lipelis

From Paul Grahams Quotes Page

"Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."
- Abelson & Sussman, SICP, preface to the first edition

"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."
- Alan Perlis

"The best writing is rewriting."
- E. B. White

"If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best."
- Donald Hall, Poetry and Ambition

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."
- Einstein

"The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."
- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy?

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
- Mark Twain

"Get the important things right."
- N. P. Collingwood