Famous Statemtns

If you haven't had enough, yet, of those ubiquitous collections of memorable phrases, epigrams, aphorisms, and adages, here is mine.

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
Alan Perlis

Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
Edsger W. Dijkstra

When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
Steve Hoflich

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

A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
Alan Perlis

Visual Basic is not an object oriented language, it is an object based language. It is a poor imitation of an object system for a poor imitation of a programming language that poor imitations of programmers use to write poor imitations of programs for poor imitations of employers who pay poor imitations of programmers salaries. I think I beat that one to death.
Jim H. Jacobs

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Nicholas Murray Butler

The purpose of a graphical user interface is to make simple things simpler and complex things impossible.
...

I have stopped reading Stephen King novels. Now I just read C code instead.
Richard A. O'Keefe

Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
Alan Perlis

Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks.
Thant Tessman

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp".

Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good.
Paul Graham

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Henry Spencer

What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity.
John Gilmore

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.
Edsger W. Dijkstra

People without qualities tend to regard money as a quality and do anything to improve more and more on that.
...

Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds - and fanatics.
Cassius J. Keyser

Chi fuma uccide anche te: digli di bucarsi.
a graffiti
(roughly: Who smokes kills you too: tell him to shoot up.)

It needs some clues to get to a conclusion.
Intelligent people need fewer clues to get to a conclusion.
It doesn't need any clue at all for an imbecile to jump to a conclusion.
...

History is written by those who can't read it. Thus it's destined to repeat itself over and over again.
...

Rock singers are those who think things may seem more interesting if yelled to a microphone.
...

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
Douglas Adams

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My Favourite List of (famous) Phrases