Vista is a large program that is a type of Microsoft—oh, let's say like a homepage. It's not a writing program.

—A confused user explains Vista to another confused user

Ubuntu, which is an ancient African word meaning "can't install Debian"...

—Mark Pilgrim

On the other hand, a few boxes running Fold@Home is a conscientious alternative to a space heater.

—JCL, "What to do with a spare computer"

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.

—Stan Kelly-Bootle

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

—Edsger Dijkstra

Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it.

—Norman Diamond

In a room full of top software designers, if two agree on the same thing, that's a majority.

—Bill Curtis

Programming in C++ is premature optimization.

—Software quips

From a programmer’s point of view, the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request.

—Peter Williams

Doors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.

...there will be travel at 1000 m.p.h. at a penny a mile...

And this isn't science fiction. It's science fact - futuristic ideas, conceived by imaginative young men, whose crazy-sounding schemes have got the nod from the scientists.

—Will Life be Worth Living in 2,000 AD?

MonsterText: a text editor that gives you the features you need, not the features you want.

—OS X Apps

The second change to to the grammar rules of foreign languages is that
all symbols used to indicate the beginning or end of a block must be
prefixed with the '#' character. If you are a former Pascal or Ada
programmer this will change your usual notation to:

if x: #BEGIN
x = x + 1
#END

—Fredrik Lundh, Python Block Delimited Notation Parsing Explained

<revmoo> does flock() not work on ntfs?
<Hendrix-> only if you compile with -lshepherd

—QDB

<+CmOrHaIr> i can put a computer together and be prepareing the hdd in 20 min
<+CmOrHaIr> or 15 even
<+Jackworks> CmOrHaIr: if u do it in 15 i bet i can make it in 14
* ^Caliban makes sure to avoid any computers put together by Cmor or Jack

—QDB

Briefly explain how a nuclear reactor works.

—Professor Trefil

Beep go boom, sir.

—Devastro

In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time. Therefore Space and Time are Yin and Yang of programming.

After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless.

A well-written program is its own heaven;
A poorly-written program is its own hell.

—The Tao of Programming

I hesitate to name these courses explicitly. I wouldn't be agile enough to dodge the game of graphic bloodshed aimed at me by animated, project-managing, object-oriented engineers using Java and Web 2.0 technologies to roast me via user interfaces designed rationally through teamwork and modern software methodologies. I'd become a case study in the ethics of software and its impact on our culture.

—Steve Yegge

Imagine the kind of conversation you would have with someone so far away that there was a transmission delay of one minute. Now imagine speaking to someone in the next room. You wouldn’t just have the same conversation faster, you would have a different kind of conversation. In Lisp, developing software is like speaking face-to-face. You can test code as you’re writing it. And instant turnaround has just as dramatic an effect on development as it does on conversation. You don’t just write the same program faster; you write a different kind of program.

—Paul Graham, "On Lisp"

You can write Java code that's object-oriented but C-like using arrays, vectors, linked lists, hashtables, and a minimal sprinkling of classes. Or you can spend years creating mountains of class hierarchies and volumes of UML in a heroic effort to tell people stories about all the great code you're going to write someday.

Perl, Python and Ruby fail to attract many Java and C++ programmers because, well, they force you to get stuff done. It's not very easy to drag your heels and dicker with class modeling in dynamic languages, although I suppose some people still manage. By and large these languages (like C) force you to face the computation head-on. That makes them really unpopular with metadata-addicted n00bs. It's funny, but I used to get really pissed off at Larry Wall for calling Java programmers "babies". It turns out the situation is a little more complicated than that... but only a little.

—Steve Yegge, "Portrait of a N00b"

Also, I should note that you may not use this code in your own applications. If you want to reduce a variable by 89, you'll have to find another way to do it.

—Jake Vinson, The Daily WTF

One guy had the audacity to say this:

"Okay PG, it's time to call you out. Unicode support is not trivial, like you make it out to be, and it's not a waste of time. It's a critical piece of infrastructure for any runtime. You fail."

Then came the knockout punch. Patrick Collison of CROMA fame added full Unicode support to Arc by adding -2 (that's minus two!) lines to Arc! Mr. Graham came out with this followup to the above sass:

"I'm glad this is preserved for posterity, since it did turn out to be trivial and in fact got added with about -2 lines of code a few days after this comment was posted..."

—On adding Unicode to Arc

Microsoft: "You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips."
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
You have bad grammar.

—overheard on the Internet

Some people think my first name is Diffie.

—Martin Hellman on the invention of Public Key Cryptography.

In any case every language is either trying to re-invent lisp or smalltalk. Let's just learn those and be done with it.

—timmy on the Next Big Language.

Whatever type of programmer you choose to hire, make sure he is not exposed to sunlight at any point. Any light brighter than the glow of a monitor will kill a programmer.

—Uncyclopedia on Programmers

When Bruce Schneier was born, the doctor slapped the security guard.

Albert Einstein wears Bruce Schneier pajamas.

Bruce Schneier can deciper line noise.

SHA = "Schneier Has Access"

Bruce Schneier created the first Honeypot; we now call it the Internet.

Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it.

Bruce Schneier generated his RSA key with the two largest prime numbers.

Bruce Schneier taught his dog to do a secure handshake.

Setting the SSID of an open Wi-Fi network to "bruceschneier" makes it completely secure.

'NP' means 'No Problem' to Bruce Schneier.

Bruce Schneier is always the man in the middle.

—Bruce Schneier Facts

Apple's new MacBook Air's fat end is slimmer than the skinny end of Sony's thinnest Vaio notebook. This is a major technical and aesthetic breakthrough, and a killer feature for those vexed by the fact that you can't send laptops via interoffice mail.

—Paul Boutin on the MacBook Air

We're told that if you don't like it, you're obviously missing something: "It's aimed at a different market!" Which market is that.. more money than sense?

—Jem on the MacBook Air

First you have a background which looks like a piece of graph paper after it has been used to smash up a family of frogs. On top of this is a sort of three-dimensional computer terminal, as if the fact that you're using an actual computer to view the website isn't quite "computery" enough. In the center of this is something called "Pepsi World," which has just exploded. All of these elements combine to give me a kind of headache that is very small but will never go away.

—eKarjala, on Pepsi's webpage in 1996.

It puts the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the Zune again.

—Macenstein comment