Robert Love Quotes

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine.

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.

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.

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

I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That's what 'Secret Coders' is. It's both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science.

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.

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.

Anytime you want to hear about graph partitioning, I will be glad to tell you what I know about graph partitioning. It remains a standard problem. I think it's an interesting problem, because it shows up in a variety of guises in real life.

After graduating in 1973 I went into the programming field.

I don't program or code or anything like that.

I started programming Apples in seventh grade.

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

A brute force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work.

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

Programming is all about numbers.

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.

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

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

In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.

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.

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

Personally, I tend to be more interested in security and performance-related issues than other things.

When you learn to code, it opens up for you to learn many other things.

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.