Richard Stallman Quotes

The most important people is to pick people who like to write software and who are good at... good developers like working with each other. And they... they reinforce each other's skills.

The critical thing in developing software is not the program, it's the design. It is translating understanding of user needs into something that can be realized as a computer program.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

C++ is designed to allow you to express ideas, but if you don't have ideas or don't have any clue about how to express them, C++ doesn't offer much help.

Technology and computers are very much at the core of our economy going forward. To be prepared for the demands of the 21st century-and to take advantage of its opportunities-it is essential that more of our students today learn basic computer programming skills, no matter what field of work they want to pursue.

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

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

Always think about how a piece of code should be used: good interfaces are the essence of good code. You can hide all kinds of clever and dirty code behind a good interface if you really need such code.

Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Listening, Testing, Coding, Designing. That's all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

Press releases are easier to write than code, and that is still easier than making a great product.

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.

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

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.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.