Niklaus Wirth Quotes

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

I worked as a programmer for 16 years.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

I am a programmer.

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

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

I designed and developed an unbelievable number of applications early in my life.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

I was a programmer.

Epic started out with scripting languages in the first generation of the Unreal engine in 1998. I wrote that. There's a place in my heart that comes along with the simplicity of programming in a scripting language.

I think everyone should learn how to code.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

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.

Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost.

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