A feature is a bug with seniority.

Weinberg’s Second Law

If carpenters made buildings the way programmers make programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy all of civilization.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.

We don’t manage our time as well as we manage our space. There’s an overhead of starting and an overhead of stopping a project because you kind of lose your momentum. And you’ve got to bracket and put aside all the things you’re already doing. So you need reasonably large blocks of uninterrupted time if you’re going to be successful at doing some of these things. That’s why hackers tend to stay up late. If you stay up late and you have another hour of work to do, you can just stay up another hour later without running into a wall and having to stop. Whereas it might take three or four hours if you start over, you might finish if you just work that extra hour. If you’re a morning person, the day always intrudes a fixed amount of time in the future. So it’s much less efficient. Which is why I think computer people tend to be night people — because a machine doesn’t get sleepy.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any analytical revelations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

Epigram 2:

Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.