According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

  • Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
  • Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
  • Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

threevirtues.com


"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing."

Alan J. Perlis (1922-1990), first recipient of the Turing Award


The more I learn, the more I'm convinced that there's nothing that can't be learned.

Jamis Buck


If you learn only methods, you’ll be tied to your methods. But if you learn principles, you can devise your own methods.

Ralph Waldo Emerson


Later equals never

LeBlanc


Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Linus Torvalds


Any fool can write a program that a computer would understand but few can write one which humans would understand.