Here is a list of great programming quotes from my readings over the last year. It is interesting to note that most of my reading material this year has been from blogs. There are just a great amount of programmer bloggers writing a lot of informative tutorials on every programming language, paradigm shift, and framework under the sun.

in my experience, one of the most significant problems in software development is assuming. If you assume a method will passed the right parameter value, the method will fail.

— Paul M. Duvall

Continuous Integration

Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.

— Derek Sivers

7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

The sooner we start coding fewer frameworks and more programs the sooner we’ll become better programmers.

— Warped Java Guy

Elementary Java Solutions

Starting a startup is hard, but having a 9 to 5 job is hard too, and in some ways a worse kind of hard.

— Paul Graham

The Future of Web Startups

In essence, let the market design the product.

— Paul Graham

The Future of Web Startups

A startup now can be just a pair of 22 year old guys. A company like that can move much more easily than one with 10 people, half of whom have kids.

— Paul Graham

The Future of Web Startups

Startups almost never get it right the first time. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares. Don’t assume when this happens that you’ve failed. That’s normal for startups. But don’t sit around doing nothing. Iterate.

— Paul Graham

How Not to Die

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.

— Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

You’ll spend far more time babysitting old technologies than implementing new ones.

— Jason Hiner

IT Dirty Secrets

To Iterate is Human, to Recurse, Divine.

— James O. Coplien

No one hates software more than software developers.

— Jeff Atwood

Hanselminutes Podcast 74

I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprised me.

— Matz

The Philosophy of Ruby

Good architecture is necessary to give programs enough structure to be able to grow large without collapsing into a puddle of confusion.

— Douglas Crockford

The Elements of JavaScript Style

Programming is difficult. At its core, it is about managing complexity. Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make. Quality is illusive and elusive.

— Douglas Crockford

The Elements of JavaScript Style

Code reuse is the Holy Grail of Software Engineering.

— Douglas Crockford

The Elements of JavaScript Style

The structure of software systems tend to reflect the structure of the organization that produce them.

— Douglas Crockford

The Elements of JavaScript Style

The definition of Hell is working with dates in Java, JDBC, and Oracle. Every single one of them screw it up.

— Dick Wall

CommunityOne 2007: Lunch with the Java Posse

Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She’d probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience.

— Larry Wall

Programming is Hard, Let’s Go Scripting…

I went to school to learn how to program software applications, which inevitably have bug defects. There was no course at my university on testing, debugging, profiling, or optimization. These things you have to learn on your own, usually in a tight deadline.

— Juixe TechKnow

To most Java developers, Ruby/Rails is like a mistress. Ruby/Rails is young, new, and exciting; but eventually we go back to old faithful, dependable, and employable Java with some new tricks and idioms and we are the better programmer for it.

— Juixe TechKnow

You might as well pay your customers 50K because they are just your QA.

— Juixe TechKnow