quotes
words worth keeping.
Things I've read or heard that stuck with me. Grouped loosely by theme.
On Craft
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”
“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
On Learning
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.”
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”
On Building
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
“Make it work, make it right, make it fast.”
“Good software, like wine, takes time.”
“Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.”
On Life
“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
On Mathematics
“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”
“God does arithmetic.”
“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”