Brian Kernighan Quotes

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.

I am a programmer. If I write code, I don't evaluate the results by what I hope the code will be. I evaluate it by what happens when I compile it. I evaluate it by results.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

If you think about computer programming, it's as antisocial as it gets.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group.

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

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.

Somebody writing a subroutine is unbelievable boring.

Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program.

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

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.

I am a programmer.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

I never have been a coder, outside of when I was twelve or something, like on the Atari 1200 XP or whatever I had.

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.

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.

Code is just a list of instructions. There are countries that are teaching it as part of the core curriculum. Having some experience in those early years is very important.

I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.

When you click on a link, you are replicating the string of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn't life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life.

You might not think that programmers are artists, but programming is an extremely creative profession. It's logic-based creativity.