Rob Pike Quotes

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

Even though I had the talent, programming just didn't feel right. I never considered it very seriously. Some people get gratification from bending a machine to their will. I didn't.

Programmers can be lazy.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

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.

The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago.

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

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.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

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.

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

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.

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

Computer programming is pretty much guaranteed income. I'm good at it, and I like it.

We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.

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.

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.

I didn't do programming language stuff in college at all.

Teaching someone to program is like giving them a superpower.