Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.

-- Alan J. Perlis, 1982, source

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

-- Philip Greenspun, 1990, source

Some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and State.

-- Guy Steele

To put it bluntly, the discipline of programming languages has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences. PL researchers are all too often preoccupied with petty mathematical problems of interest only to themselves. This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in.

-- Manuel Simoni, 2014, source

Without the wind, the grass does not move. Without software, hardware is useless.

-- The Tao of Programming, source

static analysis is when you run "grep" and dynamic analysis is when you run "gdb"

-- Petr Sovietov, 2021

One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons." Moon patiently told the student the following story: "One day a student came to Moon and said, "I understand how to make a better garbage collector..."

source

A secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers.

-- Bruce Schneier, 2000, source

We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

-- David Clark, 1992, source

In program proving, only the presence of bugs in ones proof is ascertainable, not their absence.

-- F.X. Raid, 1986, source

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

-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, source

Those who view mathematical science, not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and logical completeness, when regarded in their connexion together as a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all profound and logical minds, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst: those who thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator's works, will regard with especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit practical forms.

-- Ada Lovelace, 1842, source

Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.

-- Keith Bostic