Charles Petzold Quotes

I am a programmer.

I was a programmer.

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.

Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.

Software is the language of automation.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.

Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

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.

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

Depending on the kind of code you write, depending on the kind of ideas you have, you can be creative in problem-solving and you can really make things work in a very gratifying way.

I think everyone should learn how to code.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There's a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.

After 14 years of running DonorsChoose.org as someone who had never written a line of code, I did do a three-month night school course. After all these years, I could at least speak some of the same vocabulary and have a first-hand appreciation for what my colleagues on the engineering team are doing.

My first introduction to computers and computer programming came during my freshman year of college. I majored in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science, so I learned during my required courses at Vanderbilt University.