Linus Torvalds Quotes

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

Don't hurry your code. Make sure it works well and is well designed. Don't worry about timing.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that. I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Get the weirdnesses into the data where you can manipulate them easily, and the regularity into the code because regular code is a lot easier to work with

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.

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

Good candidates can arrive at the binary search tree as the right path in a few minutes, and then take 10-15 minutes working through the rest of the problem and the other roadblocks I toss out. But occasionally I get a candidate who 'intuitively understands' trees and can visualize the problem I'm presenting.

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes.

I think the best developers can learn any language; if they are a good developer, they can learn whatever. But the raw talent, the ability to learn it and do it and demonstrate the ability is helpful.

I grew up as a computer scientist, and I've always been fascinated by algorithms.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.

C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

It is intelligence that brings order, not discipline.

The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

It's amazing how much data is out there. The question is how do we put it in a form that's usable?