101 More Great Computer Quotes (2024)

In response to my original article, “101 Great Computer Programming Quotes,” José M. Aguilar doubled the fun with “101 More Great Computer Quotes,” which was translated, edited and republished here by Timm Martin (and Google Translator) with permission from Mr. Aguilar.

Computing

1. “I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.”
   — Isaac Asimov
   
2. “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”
   — Emo Philips
   
3. “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.”
   — Edsger W. Dijkstra
   
4. “The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before.”
   — Bill Gates
   
5. “Software is like entropy: It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.”
   — Norman Augustine
   
6. “Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container.”
   — Nathan Myhrvold
   
7. “All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.”
   — IBM Manual, 1925
   
8. “Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.”
   — Alan Bennett
   
9. “Physics is the universe’s operating system.”
   — Steven R Garman
   
10. “It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.”
    — Craig Bruce
    

Knowledge

11. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
    — Albert Einstein
    
12. “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
    — Stephen Hawking
    
13. “The more you know, the more you realize you know nothing.”
    — Socrates
    
14. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
    — Benjamin Franklin
    
15. “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
    — Confucius
    
16. “If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
    — Ludwig Wittgenstein
    
17. “Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.”
    — Mitchell Kapor
    

Users

18. “If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it.”
    — Linus Torvalds
    
19. “From a programmer’s point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.”
    — P. Williams
    
20. “Where is the ‘any’ key?”
    — Homer Simpson, in response to the message, “Press any key”
    
21. “Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.”
    — Donald Knuth
    
22. “There is only one problem with common sense; it’s not very common.”
    — Milt Bryce
    
23. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
    — Bill Gates
    
24. “Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”
    — Donald E. Knuth
    

Internet

25. “The Internet? We are not interested in it.”
    — Bill Gates, 1993
    
26. “The best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections.”
    — Matthew Austern
    

Professionals

27. “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
    
28. “Pessimists, we’re told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”
    — Bob Lewis
    
29. “In a room full of top software designers, if two agree on the same thing, that’s a majority.”
    — Bill Curtis
    
30. “It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.”
    — Nathaniel S. Borenstein
    
31. “Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren’t doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they’re sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.”
    — Charles M. Strauss
    
32. “If you think you are worth what you know, you are very wrong. Your knowledge today does not have much value beyond a couple of years. Your value is what you can learn and how easily you can adapt to the changes this profession brings so often.”
    — Jose M. Aguilar
    

Programming

33. “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
    — Abelson and Sussman
    
34. “Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom — you never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests.”
    — Ryan Campbell
    
35. “We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.”
    — Jeff Atwood
    
36. “Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.”
    — John Carmack
    
37. “It’s OK to figure out murder mysteries, but you shouldn’t need to figure out code. You should be able to read it.”
    — Steve McConnell
    
38. “If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent.'”
    — Edsger Dijkstra
    
39. “Programming can be fun, so can cryptography; however they should not be combined.”
    — Kreitzberg and Shneiderman
    
40. “Before software should be reusable, it should be usable.”
    — Ralph Johnson
    
41. “If you automate a mess, you get an automated mess.”
    — Rod Michael
    
42. “Looking at code you wrote more than two weeks ago is like looking at code you are seeing for the first time.”
    — Dan Hurvitz
    
43. “It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.”
    — Alan Perlis
    
44. “Less than 10% of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure maintenance, and other housekeeping.”
    — Mary Shaw
    
45. “If you have a procedure with ten parameters, you probably missed some.”
    — Alan Perlis
    
46. “How rare it is that maintaining someone else’s code is akin to entering a beautifully designed building, which you admire as you walk around and plan how to add a wing or do some redecorating. More often, maintaining someone else’s code is like being thrown headlong into a big pile of slimy, smelly garbage.”
    — Bill Venners
    
47. “Code generation, like drinking alcohol, is good in moderation.”
    — Alex Lowe
    

Development

48. “Simplicity, carried to the extreme, becomes elegance.”
    — Jon Franklin
    
49. “A program is never less than 90% complete, and never more than 95% complete.”
    — Terry Baker
    
50. “When you are stuck in a traffic jam with a Porsche, all you do is burn more gas in idle. Scalability is about building wider roads, not about building faster cars.”
    — Steve Swartz
    
51. “Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design — designing too early what a program should do.”
    — Paul Graham
    
52. “Programming without an overall architecture or design in mind is like exploring a cave with only a flashlight: You don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know quite where you are.”
    — Danny Thorpe
    
53. “The best way to predict the future is to implement it.”
    — David Heinemeier Hansson
    
54. “We need above all to know about changes; no one wants or needs to be reminded 16 hours a day that his shoes are on.”
    — David Hubel
    
55. “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘If you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
    — Charles Babbage
    
56. “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
    — Albert Einstein
    
57. “Today, most software exists, not to solve a problem, but to interface with other software.”
    — IO Angell
    
58. “Good specifications will always improve programmer productivity far better than any programming tool or technique.”
    — Milt Bryce
    
59. “The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.”
    — Richard Moore
    

Quality

60. “Don’t document the problem, fix it.”
    — Atli Björgvin Oddsson
    
61. “As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.”
    — Dave Parnas
    
62. “If the code and the comments do not match, possibly both are incorrect.”
    — Norm Schryer
    
63. “I think it’s a new feature. Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.”
    — Larry Wall
    
64. “If you don’t handle [exceptions], we shut your application down. That dramatically increases the reliability of the system.”
    — Anders Hejlsberg
    
65. “When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.”
    — Richard Pattis
    
66. “In a software project team of 10, there are probably 3 people who produce enough defects to make them net negative producers.”
    — Gordon Schulmeyer
    
67. “I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.”
    — Alan Perlis
    
68. “Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence.”
    — Edsger Dijkstra
    

Programming Languages

69. “Manually managing blocks of memory in C is like juggling bars of soap in a prison shower: It’s all fun and games until you forget about one of them.”
    — anonymous Usenet user
    
70. “There’s no obfuscated Perl contest because it’s pointless.”
    — Jeff Polk
    
71. “Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.”
    — Alan Kay
    
72. “There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation.”
    — Bertrand Meyer
    
73. “It was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it!”
    — Mark Andreesen, speaking of the HTML tag BLINK
    
74. “Web Services are like teenage sex. Everyone is talking about doing it, and those who are actually doing it are doing it badly.”
    — Michelle Bustamante
    
75. “Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
    — Keith Bostic
    
76. “I didn’t work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it’s not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.”
    — Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka “Matz”, creator of Ruby
    
77. “XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language.”
    — Charles Simonyi
    
78. “BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.”
    — Seymour Papert
    
79. “It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable facility for concealing the trivial details of a program — such as where its bugs are.”
    — David Keppel
    
80. “UNIX is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.”
    — Dennis Ritchie
    
81. “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.”
    — Jamie Zawinski
    

Security

82. “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.”
    — Stephen Hawking
    
83. “The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.”
    — Gene Spafford
    
84. “Being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.”
    — Eric Raymond
    
85. “Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption and secure access devices, and it’s money wasted, because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain.”
    — Kevin Mitnick
    
86. “If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.”
    — Bruce Schneier
    
87. “Hoaxes use weaknesses in human behavior to ensure they are replicated and distributed. In other words, hoaxes prey on the Human Operating System.”
    — Stewart Kirkpatrick
    
88. “Passwords are like underwear: you don’t let people see it, you should change it very often, and you shouldn’t share it with strangers.”
    — Chris Pirillo
    

Companies

89. “I am not out to destroy Microsoft, that would be a completely unintended side effect.”
    — Linus Torvalds
    
90. “Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress.”
    — Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
    
91. “In an information economy, the most valuable company assets drive themselves home every night. If they are not treated well, they do not return the next morning.”
    — Peter Chang
    
92. “It’s better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.”
    — Steve McConnell
    
93. “I’m not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn’t need an interpreter.”
    — Nicholas Petreley
    

Predictions

94. “Two years from now, spam will be solved.”
    — Bill Gates, 2004
    
95. “The problem of viruses is temporary and will be solved in two years.”
    — John McAfee, 1988
    
96. “Computer viruses are an urban legend.”
    — Peter Norton, 1988
    
97. “In 2031, lawyers will be commonly a part of most development teams.”
    — Grady Booch
    
98. “I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.”
    — CA Hoare, 1982
    
99. “In the future, computers may weigh no more than 1.5 tonnes.”
    — Popular mechanics, 1949
    
100. “I see little commercial potential for the Internet for at least ten years.”
     — Bill Gates, 1994
     
101. “Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia.”
     — Arthur Summerfield, 1959, United States Post

Article published on April 12, 2008