Programming Expertise Quotes

A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven

If you think you're a really good programmer... read Knuth's Art of Computer Programming... You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing.

I'm really good at making software for publishing.

I've known people who have not mastered their tools who are good programmers, but not a tool master who remained a mediocre programmer.

After graduate school, I joined Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island as an assistant professor, but I continued to program in addition to teaching and working on research. I built a program that crawled job boards to determine which skills employers value, which helped Johnson & Wales explore ways to improve its curriculum.

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

My brother, who's ten years younger than me, worked with me in the studio when he was very young. He's a guitar player and does programming as well. To have the working and personal relationship coincide has been very natural.

An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers.

There are no standards for computer programmers and no group to certify them.

A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity.