Donald Knuth

“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.”

“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”

“People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.”

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

“The best theory is inspired by practice. The best practice is inspired by theory.”

“My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket.”

“Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty.”

“There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.”

“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”

“Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something, you can put beauty into it.”

“The psychological profiling of a programmer is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level.”