Perlisisms - "Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis

The quote "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." used to be my favorite quote of all time, but it was replaced by "Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."

There are a lot of good ones:

* "It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one."

* "A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."

* "Everything should be built top-down, except the first time."

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

* "There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."

Earlier HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482630