Linus Torvalds Quotes

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code.

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

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.

Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.

The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.

When you program, you want to think you're writing the best possible program for the... for the task you're trying to solve.

People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.

Learning how to code and program computers when I was a kid was one of the best choices I made growing up. By writing code, I learned how to bring my dreams to life, how to budget, and how to build stuff. Whatever path you choose in life - being an artist, an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher, or even a politician, you will give yourself a huge leg up if you learn how to code.

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

Programming is not a science. Programming is a craft.

The most important people is to pick people who like to write software and who are good at... good developers like working with each other. And they... they reinforce each other's skills.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

As Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work thats gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty language features of C#.

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.

When somebody has learned how to program a computer ... You're joining a group of people who can do incredible things. They can make the computer do anything they can imagine.

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job.