Bill Gates Quotes

I was a programmer.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

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.

I am a programmer.

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes.

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.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

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

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

I think everyone should learn how to code.

Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems.

I think everyone should get a little exposure to computer science because it really forces you to think in a slightly different way, and it's a skill that you can apply in life in general, whether you end up in computer science or not.

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.

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

In this respect a program is like a poem: you cannot write a poem without writing it. Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced". In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to "the number of lines of code spent".

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%.

There are people who actually like programming. I dont understand why they like programming.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

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.

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

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.

We ought to be keeping in mind that the technology is not just hardware and machinery, it is also software. So you can think of languages of the technology and writing of the technology and the social justice of the technology in what social justice does is reduce impacts on the Earth because the most impact is from the poorest and richest people.