Linus Torvalds Quotes

I am a programmer.

I was a programmer.

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

I'd always thought that if Python was going to go on at all, it'd be nice to get into storylines.

The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.

I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.

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

[...] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed - it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises-but only performance is reality.

It doesn't cost anything to replicate code. So the companies that make code, that's why they've done so well. We take it for granted now, but why is it that code is free? It's because somebody built this self-replicating process.

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.

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

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

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

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.

That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

If software's the only thing in your bag of tools, I'm not going to give you great odds.

Code writers, they are my idols.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.