You cannot just paste code with no understanding of what is going on and expect it to work. --klortho
You can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, Retardo! --klortho
You said it didn't work, but you didn't say what it would have done if it *had* worked. --klortho
What are you really trying to accomplish here? --klortho
Who the fuck cares which one is faster? --klortho
Now is the time in our program where you look at the manual. --klortho
Look at the error message!  Look at the error message! --klortho
Looking for a compiler bug is the strategy of LAST resort.  LAST resort. --klortho
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. --klortho
Bad programmer!  No cookie! --klortho
I see you omitted $! from the error message.   It won't tell you what went wrong if you don't ask it to. --klortho
You wrote the same thing twice here.  The cardinal rule of programming is that you never ever write the same thing twice. --klortho
Evidently it's important to you to get the wrong answer as quickly as possible. --klortho
Gee, I don't know.  I wonder what the manual says about that? --klortho
Well, no duh.  That's because you ignored the error message, dimwit. --klortho
Only Sherlock Holmes can debug the program by pure deduction from the output.  You are not Sherlock Holmes.  Run the fucking debugger already. --klortho
Always ignore the second error message unless the meaning is obvious. --klortho
Read.  Learn.  Evolve. --klortho
Well, then get one that *does* do auto-indent.  You can't do good work with bad tools. --klortho
No.  You must believe the ERROR MESSAGE.  You MUST believe the error message. --klortho
The error message is the Truth.  The error message is God.   --klortho
It could be anything.  Too bad you didn't bother to diagnose the error, huh? --klortho
You don't suppress error messages, you dumbass, you PAY ATTENTION and try to understand them. --klortho
Never catch a signal except as a last resort. --klortho
Well, if you don't know what it does, why did you put it in your program? --klortho
Gosh, that wasn't very bright, was it? --klortho
That's like taking a crap on someone's doorstep and then ringing the doorbell to ask for toilet paper. --klortho
A good approach to that problem would be to hire a computer programmer. --klortho
First get a book on programming.  Then read it.  Then write the program. --klortho
First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?'  Then have the computer do it the same way. --klortho
Would you like to see my rate card? --klortho
I think you are asking the wrong question here. --klortho
Holy cow. --klortho
Because it's a syntax error. --klortho
Because this is Perl, not C. --klortho
Because this is Perl, not Lisp. --klortho
Because that's the way it is. --klortho
Because. --klortho
If you have `some weird error', the problem is probably with your frobnitzer. --klortho
Because the computer cannot read your mind.  Guess what?  I cannot read your mind *either*. --klortho
You said `It doesn't work'.  The next violation will be punished by death. --klortho
Of course it doesn't work!  That's because you don't know what you are doing! --klortho
Sure, but you have to have some understanding also. --klortho
Ah yes, and you are the first person to have noticed this bug since 1987.  Sure. --klortho
Yes, that's what it's supposed to do when you say that. --klortho
Well, what did you expect? --klortho
Perhaps you have forgotten that this is an engineering discipline, not some sort of black magic. --klortho
You know, this sort of thing is amenable to experimental observation. --klortho
Perhaps your veeblefitzer is clogged. --klortho
What happens when you try? --klortho
Now you are just being superstitious.   --klortho
Your question has exceeded the system limit for pronouns in a single sentence.  Please dereference and try again. --klortho
In my experience that is a bad strategy, because the people who ask such questions are the ones who paste the answer into their program without understanding it and then complain that it `does not work'. --klortho
Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.  --klortho
If your function is written correctly, it will handle an empty array the same way as a nonempty array. --klortho
When in doubt, use brute force. --klortho
Well, it might be more intuitive that way, but it would also be useless. --klortho
Show the code. --klortho
The bug is in you, not in Perl. --klortho
Cargo-cult. --klortho
So you threw in some random punctuation for no particular reason, and then you didn't get the result you expected.  Hmmmm. --klortho
How should I know what is wrong when I haven't even seen the code?  I am not clairvoyant. --klortho
How should I know how to do what you want when you didn't say what you wanted to do? --klortho
It's easy to get the *wrong* answer in O(1) time. --klortho
I guess this just goes to show that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink it. --klortho
A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant. --Alan Perlis
BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls. --Forbes.com
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. --Alan Perlis
Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them. --Alan Perlis
Every program has (at least) two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't. --Alan Perlis
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. --Alan Perlis
I think it is inevitable that people program poorly. Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it. --Alan Perlis
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up. --Alan Perlis
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some. --Alan Perlis
If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan. --Alan Perlis
In a 5 year period we get one superb programming language - only we can't control when the 5 year period will begin. --Alan Perlis
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration". --Alan Perlis
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages. --Alan Perlis
In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm. --Alan Perlis
Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? --Alan Perlis
It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical. --Alan Perlis
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. --Alan Perlis
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one. --Alan Perlis
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing. --Alan Perlis
One man's constant is another man's variable. --Alan Perlis
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. --Alan Perlis
Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress. --Alan Perlis
Symmetry is a complexity-reducing concept (co-routines include subroutines); seek it everywhere. --Alan Perlis
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. --Alan Perlis
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman. --Alan Perlis
The computing field is always in need of new cliches. --Alan Perlis
The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information. --Alan Perlis
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. --Alan Perlis
We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses. --Alan Perlis
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop. --Alan Perlis
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN. --Alan Perlis
1. Complete the task. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
2. Fix your mistakes. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
3. Work harder than the other guy. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
4. Disclose your weaknesses. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
5. Do your best. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
6. Know your enemy (they're *all* your enemy). --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
7. "Please", "thank you", "I'm sorry", and "can I help you?" --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
8. "I don't know" and "I was mistaken". --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
9. There are no secrets. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
10. There *are* simple answers. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
11. Don't count on tomorrow. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
12. Don't count on other people. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
13. Do good for its own sake. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
14. Keep moving forward. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
15. Action trumps discussion. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
16. Don't let fear, pain, failure, or ego stop you.--John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
17. You're no better than anyone else. --John W. Mackay's Rules of Life
if you look at java.util.regex.Pattern.java, you'll get a free peek into the Intern Project from Hell.  -- Steve Yegge
Perl made Unix kinda fun, even more so than it already was. -- Steve Yegge
Friends: don't let friends use Singletons! -- Steve Yegge
Howard Aiken: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." 
Gather the nectar of other people's thoughts like a honeybee -- Seneca.
If at first you don't succeed, chainsaw juggling is not for you.
"There's nobody getting rich (by) writing software" - Bill Gates
"I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it." -- P.K. Dick
All the oohs and aahs you hear about the digital revolution are nothing but the squeals humans emit when tickled pink by Moore's Law. --Bernard Chazelle
William Gibson once said "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." 
-- Why do we have to hide from the police, daddy?  -- Because we use vi, son. They use emacs. (via Michael Crawford)
"This is the systems programming equivalent of finding a live wooly mammoth contentedly smoking a cigar in your recliner." -- Keith Wesolowski
"I know there's a farmer out there somewhere who never wants a PC and that's fine with me."--Bill Gates
'If someone tells you they have the answer, they probably haven't understood the question.' -- folk saying
'Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a great substitute for thinking.' -- the late Peter Drucker
'If you cannot explain the cause of a bug and how the change you made corrected the problem, you are fooling yourself.' -- Ingres Coding Standards
"There's only really one metric to me for future software development, which is -- do you write less code to get the same thing done?" -- Bill Gates (2005)
"No one tests the depth of a river with both feet." -- African proverb
'despite months of effort, this patch turned out to be one-line long, another lesson in how lines of code is an entirely useless metric of productivity' -- Colm MacCarthaig
'When at times I exclaimed, "I found the bug!", my son would respond with the same enthusiasm, "Did you kill it?". ' -- Sherry Q. Moore (Sun engineer)
'A customer will soon forgive you for shipping good stuff later than you promised but will never forgive you for shipping bad stuff on time.' -- folk wisdom
'Computer programming teaches humility, or at least that's my experience.' -- Brian Hayes
"Don't start optimizing your program until you've finished writing it." -- old adage, quoted by Brian Hayes
Knuth quotes Piet Hein's advice: "Err and err and err again but less and less and less."
Samuel Beckett: "Fail again. Fail better."
"Success goes to your head, happiness to your hips" - Tye McQueen
'If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.' -- Douglas Adams
'All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.' -- Douglas Adams
'Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. Although not necessarily in chronological order.' -- Douglas Adams
"[The World Wide Web is] the only thing I know of whose shortened form - www - takes three times longer to say than what it's short for." -- Douglas Adams
"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet." -- Douglas Adams
"A nerd is someone who uses a telephone to talk to other people about telephones." -- Douglas Adams
"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds." -- Douglas Adams
"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." -- Douglas Adams
'This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.' -- Douglas Adams
'If you don't document it, you might as well not build it.' -- Anonymous post on groklaw.net
"I swallowed a bug." -- River Tam
"code is not your friend: the more you have, the more maintenance costs, the more complexity is a problem." -- Marc Colan
"The person who is slowest in making a promise is most faithful in its performance." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." -- Henry Ford
If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. -- Jeff Bezos
'Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.' -- Bokonon
'Don't look for problems you don't have, because someone else who is passionate about it will solve it better than you can.' -- Joshua Schachter
'Every day you don't have something out in the world you are losing information, feedback, users, reputations. Get it out there, get the release done asap.' -- Joshua Schachter
'If you aren't sure if something is a bug, that's a bug. Please file a bug and mention your uncertainty in the bug report.' -- Tabriz (Sun Engineer)
'Real artists ship.' -- Steve Jobs
"1. Fight software rot." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"2. Catalyze change." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"3. Avoid the trap of duplicating knowledge." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"4. Write flexible, dynamic and adaptable code. " -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"5. Harness the power of basic tools." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"6. Avoid programming by coincidence." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"7. Bullet-proof your code with contracts, assertions and exceptions." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"8. Capture real requirements." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"9. Keep formal tools in their place." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"10. Test ruthlessly and effectively." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"11. Delight your users." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"12. Build teams of pragmatic programmers." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"13. Take responsibility for your work and career." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"14. Make your developments more precise with automation." -- The Pragmatic Programmer
"Add tests until fear turns into boredom" - attrib. to Ron E. Jeffries
"Wisdom begins when we discover the difference between 'that makes no sense' and 'I don't understand'" -- Mary Doria Russell 
when all else fails, try philosophy. -- taner edis 
"If you don't have the source code, you are probably going to be screwed in the long run." -- Philip Greenspun
"No amount of marketing hype suffices to make a C program work as advertised." -- Philip Greenspun
Larry Wall once said that "a Perl script is correct if it's halfway readable and gets the job done before your boss fires you." -- Mark Jason Dominus
If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? - Albert Einstein
UNIX is like Sex: If you don't know it, you don't miss it. But if you know it, you'll need it. -- Unknown
"Heavenly Father, I wish to file a Bug Report..." -- Penguinisto's /. signature
"If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing." -- Ed Post
"What the hardware giveth, the software taketh away." -- Niklaus Wirth quoted by Joe Armstrong
"After a long and careful analysis the results are clear: 11 out of 10 people can't handle threads." -- Todd Hoff, "The Solution to C++ Threading is Erlang"
   1. The Primal Scenario or Basic Datum of Experience: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
1a. Complicated systems seldom exceed five percent efficiency. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
   2. The Fundamental Theorem: New systems generate new problems. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
   4. Laws of Growth: Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
   5. The Generalized Uncertainty Principle: Systems display antics. (Complicated systems produce unexpected outcomes. The total behavior of large systems cannot be predicted.) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
   6. Le Chatelier's Principle: Complex systems tend to oppose their own proper function. As systems grow in complexity, they tend to oppose their stated function. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
   7. Functionary's Falsity: People in systems do not actually do what the system says they are doing. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
   8. The Operational Fallacy: The system itself does not actually do what it says it is doing. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  12. A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it doesn't. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  13. A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  14. Some complex systems actually work. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  15. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  16. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  17. The Functional Indeterminacy Theorem (F.I.T.): In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  18. The Newtonian Law of Systems Inertia: A system that performs a certain way will continue to operate in that way regardless of the need or of changed conditions. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  19. Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  22. A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways. (If anything can go wrong, it will.) (See Murphy's law.) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  23. The mode of failure of a complex system cannot ordinarily be predicted from its structure. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  24. The crucial variables are discovered by accident. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  25. The larger the system, the greater the probability of unexpected failure. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  27. The Fail-Safe Theorem: When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  28. Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  29. Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  30. The Vector Theory of Systems: Systems run better when designed to run downhill. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  31. Loose systems last longer and work better. (Efficient systems are dangerous to themselves and to others.) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  32. As systems grow in size, they tend to lose basic functions. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  33. The larger the system, the less the variety in the product. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  34. Control of a system is exercised by the element with the greatest variety of behavioral responses. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
  35. Colossal systems foster colossal errors. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
Helpful housekeeping hints: Check your feather pillows for holes before putting them in the washing machine. -- Darren New's email sig
It's time for a coffee.
It's time for a caipirinha!
"Agile Teams, Open Software, Passionate Users .. Life is too short for anything else." -- Ian Clatworthy
"...if I wanted concurrent Fortran, well, I'd lie down until the feeling passed off." -- Richard A. O'Keefe
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert -- Arthur C. Clarke
"The first principle of optimization is *don't*." -- The Practice of Programming
"Measur[ing] the quality of a programmer by the number of commits she makes is like measuring the quality of a legislature by the number of laws it passes." -- Karl Fogel
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
"...the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well." -- Paul Graham
"Programming is where enthusiasm meets reality." -- What Makes the History of Software Hard by Michael S. Mahoney
Esther Dyson: "Always make new mistakes"
Moen's Law of Documentation: "The more you write, the less they read." -- http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-documentation
Edwards's Law: "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem."
...if you stripped away all the "badly designed" C libs and "badly designed" OS interfaces you'd just end up interfacing directly to "badly designed" hardware. -- Adrian Hey
"Life is just too short for programmers to be manually allocating memory and manipulating pointers" -- Philip Greenspun
'If you walk too loudly down the hall near the [Windows] kernel developers, you'll break 20 to 30 apps.' -- Microsoft associate software architect Chris Jackson
"Strings are the opiate of the masses." - Richard O'Keefe
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. - E.W. Dijkstra, EWD498
...if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot." -- E.W. Dijsktra
"who gives an expletive if it's 10% slower on a single core machine?" -- Mats Cronqvist (Erlang mailing list)
"real man" programmers stare at the code in Zen contemplation and debug by powercycling -- Alan Cox
Space Corps Directive #349: Any officer found to have been slaughtered and replaced by a shape-changing chameleonic life form shall forfeit all pension rights. -- Red Dwarf
"Thought is supposed to be a guide for action. Not a substitute for it."
"If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations." - Erik Naggum
"...Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals." - Jon Ribbens
I have actually programmed a fair bit in Perl, like I have C++ code published with my name on it. Other things I have tried and have no intention to do again if I can at all avoid it include smoking, getting drunk enough to puke and waste the whole next day with hang-over, breaking a leg in a violent car crash, getting mugged in New York City, or travel with Aeroflot. - Erik Naggum
Trading debugging flexibility for small increases in runtime performance is a splendid way to lose. - Carl Shapiro
Have you considered the option of getting the joke?  If not, try it now and redeem your soul. - Erik Naggum
So much evil follows from the decision to have one namespace that it is hard to imagine that it can be the single source. - Erik Naggum
Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms ... - Alan Perlis
"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." - Douglas Adams
"Coding is an activity that is notoriously inefficient at converting money into other things." -- glyph
...programming is like frisbee, and predictions more specific than "hey, watch this!" are dangerous -- glyph
Ted Nelson: "Of course it [Xanadu] is real. You know it's real because it crashes." (quoted by Steven A. Lowe)