Brianna Wu Quotes

Programming language is very specific to instructing a computer to do a particular structure of a sequence. It's the very way you tell the machine what you want it to do.

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

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

Programming is usually taught by examples.

It's very hard to explain to people who don't program, but the object-oriented programming system made programming the Mac and iPhone so easy.

With computer science, I had to go through that uncomfortable process of my brain establishing a hash table, if you will - the coders will get that - for this new information, because I didn't have one. So I had to establish a brand-new file system from scratch.

Whether you draw diagrams that generate code or you type at a browser, you are coding.

I am a programmer.

I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.

I don't understand computers. I've been unable to construct a working mental model of how they do what they do. I can break software by looking at it. I can blow anything up. Without trying. It's sort of like being a dowser. And this extreme elaborate clumsiness on my part is actually something people will pay me for. It's quite wonderful.

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked: needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.