Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested.

Ellen Ullman

The truth is I'm not actually an expert programmer! I really don't consider myself to be an expert at anything. For me, it's more about having a well-rounded and broad horizon. I think that's where a lot of the more interesting things come from - mashing up completely disparate aspects of life to create something new and original.

Aaron Koblin

Truth Life Where

LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.

Alan Perlis

Very Value Thing

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

Alan Perlis

Within Wit Who

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

Alan Perlis

Attitude You Vitality

I am a freelance programmer so I am flexible about my working hours and have quite a lot of free time.

Alexandra Elbakyan

Work Time Working

I was hired as a computer programmer for a national laboratory at age 15.

Andy Weir

Age Tory T

When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.

Annalee Newitz

Amazing World Wheel

Whether you're looking at manufacturing and the use of robotics or the knowledge industries, they need computer programmers.

Asa Hutchinson

Knowledge You Whether

You could summarize everything I did at Apple was making tools to empower creative people. 'QuickDraw' empowered all these other programmers to now be able to sling stuff on the screen. The 'Window Manager,' 'Event Manager,' and 'Menu Manager.' Those are things that I worked on that were empowering other people.

Bill Atkinson

Work Power Men

It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.

Bill Budge

Good Computers Would

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

Bjarke Ingels

Love Wit Very

The standard library saves programmers from having to reinvent the wheel.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Wheel Vent Tan

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Change Art Years

I think that's the responsibility of the CEO and the CEOs below me: to make sure that we're constantly putting people in places where they have the opportunity to develop into those careers but also having a rewards and recognition system that allows a great programmer to stay as a great programmer.

Bobby Kotick

War Great Car

The mark of a mature programmer is willingness to throw out code you spent time on when you realize it's pointless.

Bram Cohen

Time You Willingness

When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket.

Brenda Laurel

Art Wit Turquoise

And, I think that is actually appropriate because I'm really not the world's best programmer, I think it's a good thing that I'm not touching the code.

Brian Behlendorf

Good World Use

I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.

Brianna Wu

Hope Write Will

When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a writer and an artist when I grew up. So in college, I was an English major, and then I became a fine artist. But when I arrived in San Francisco in 1995, I figured I could leverage my artistic skills by becoming a Web designer and programmer.

Caterina Fake

Design Art Age

I created DonorsChoose by putting pencil to paper - literally - and sketching out each screen of the web site and how it would work. Then I paid a programmer from Poland $1,500 to turn my sketches and common-sense rules into a functioning website.

Charles Best

Work Would Website

The tastes of country music fans are not limited to the narrow range defined by consultants and programmers and record company moguls.

Charley Pride

My high school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, showed me that anything is possible and that you're never too young to think big. At 15, I worked as a computer programmer at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. After graduating, I attended Stanford for a degree in economics and computer science.

Clara Shih

If you, or any public-spirited programmer, wanted to figure out what the software on your machine is really doing, tough luck. It's illegal to reverse engineer the source code of commercial software to find out how it works.

Clive Thompson

There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them.

Dave Parnas

I'm exploring this world of game development and GPU and getting involved in any capacity that I can to meet talented artists and programmers and developers. That's what you're gonna need to get a high-end experience done.

Deadmau5

I'm not a programmer; I'm more of a performer. I'm really bad at math.

Du Yun

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 Dijkstra

The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. He therefore approaches his task with full humility, and avoids clever tricks like the plague.

Edsger Dijkstra

Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.

Edwin Catmull

Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it.

Ellen Ullman

Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested.

Ellen Ullman

My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did.

Ellen Ullman

To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.

Ellen Ullman

The world of programmers is not going to change on its own.

Ellen Ullman

People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.

Ellen Ullman

Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.

Ellen Ullman

I don't like the idea that Facebook controls how people express themselves and changes it periodically according to whatever algorithms they use to figure out what they should do or the whim of some programmer or some CEO. That bothers me a great deal.

Ellen Ullman

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

Eric Allman

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

Eric S. Raymond

When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized - when they're not bored - and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work.

Eric S. Raymond

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

Esther Dyson

My dad grew up as a computer programmer, so he always had random computer software, and I started opening up editing software at age 12 and figuring out how to build websites.

Eva Gutowski

Making AI more sensitive to the full scope of human thought is no simple task. The solutions are likely to require insights derived from fields beyond computer science, which means programmers will have to learn to collaborate more often with experts in other domains.

Fei-Fei Li

I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.

G. Willow Wilson

In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.

G. Willow Wilson

My first job was as a programmer. So I feel like I'm familiar with the information technology sector and the information technology culture.

Gene Luen Yang

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

Gopi Sundar

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.

Graham Moore

I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?

Halsey

And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it.

Hannah Fry